I am continuing my effort to catch the blog up to the progress of the airplane. There will be a lot of photos here and sparse detail since I want to get current on the blog and get to some of the more exciting things, so here are some more updates.
After getting the panel cut and the flanges for the top cowl done, we worked on many small things. One of which was getting a fresh air vent installed in the front and rear seats. For the front seat I copied Berkut13, and added a bulkhead to the strake cutout for the eyeball vent.
Another small project was adding a NACA vent for the rear seat fresh air vent as well as the mounting for the eyeball vent outlet. The NACA needed to be made from scratch since any pre-made vent I could find was in the “ludicrous” price range. So a mold was made using coordinates that I found online for the NACA submerged inlet design. There was a 7 degree angle cut on the block and the mold was mounted to a molding plate. Since I do not have vacuum bagging capabilities in my shop, I used a low tech method to force the fiber glass into the sharp corners of the mold.
The NACA inlet was mounted to the fuselage, and a aluminum plate was made up to mount the eyeball vent into the passengers right side console. In addition to the vent, there is a 12 volt receptacle and interphone plugs in the plate.
The rear turtle deck interior cover was also completed. Both the forward edge of the exposed foam as well as a cosmetic plate that will cover the turtle deck cavity. The fuel vent manifold is mounted in here, and in the future this will be a place to mount the engine monitor electronics or possibly other items.
In addition to all of this we did get the hold down made, fit and installed to the forward compartment. It was made with space for a neoprene piece to be used as a cushion and clamp to hold the battery down. The neoprene is scrap baffle seal material, it should be readily available when it needs to be replaced.
With the exception of a bit of finishing work on the interior consoles, smoothing out the edges that pretty much catches us up to the first aerobatic maneuver for the Long. We flipped the airplane upside down in preparation for fabricating the lower cowl. Hopefully tomorrow I will get you caught up on that and some of the prep work before starting on the cowl.
Coming back to today, I have the shape for the lower cowl pretty much dialed in. I will detail shaping the lower cowl, and the preparation for that in few posts when I can get caught up. The plan is to have a cowl by Friday, so here is a teaser photo of approximately where we are.
the Garaggio 