Today we started by working on Greg’s Long Ez, N23X. Greg put new wheels and brakes on, so we had to bleed the brakes. It was a simple procedure, but took a little bit for us to accomplish. The key was to level the airplane, not to bleed the system with the nose on the ground. There was quite a bit of air in the lines since the calipers were changed, and so it made things easier having the nose off the ground.
Additionally, N23X needed the wing bolt torques checked as well as control deflection of the rudders checked. Both of these other tasks were quick and easy. Sorry we didn’t get pictures of any of this.
We then came back to the Garaggio and discussed my elevator torque tube seals. There are some issues with the method as well as design of the torque tube seals, and eventually we talked ourselves into a corner and decided we were spending too much time on this. I am convinced that it can be done. done easily, and effectively. But the ideas were not coming.
Instead we focused on getting the canard intersection fairings under way.We had the planform of the fairing drawn on the fuselage already. It was time to add foam. We masked off areas we didn’t want to get foamed and prep sanded anywhere foam was going to bond to the structure. Then it was make some damns, pour foam, and start carving.
I started removing foam that didn’t belong with saws and eventually switched to various different size and shape sanding blocks, files, and die grinder implements. Once the edges of the fairing were down to the planform lines drawn on the fuselage, it was pretty easy to see how things were suppose to be. the biggest issue was consistency left to right. But I am very happy with them. You can see photos of the canard intersection fairing below. They Just need to be glassed.
While I was working on shaping these fairings, Greg started to work on the canopy. There was some masking tape that was left “on” the canopy where it was used as a mask to build the frame. Greg started by digging that out of the flox corners near the plexiglass. There is still plenty to do on the canopy.
the Garaggio 