Merry Christmas 2015 from Mike & Sarah-- no pic from the factory this time. And sorry about the socks... a dude's gotta stay comfy, ya know?
It's been a busy week in the factory leading up to this point! My apologies for not posting an update in a while, but rest assured things have been continuing along.
First order of business, we hit 10,000 views today on Christmas Day itself... cool! I received one email from #10,002, so I'll be in touch with that person shortly. Excited that this silly idea of ours seems to have worked!
So let's see, we left off when we had glued the two door halves together and clecoed everything to the fuselage for curing. Trimming the doors was a painstaking process, and one that is by no means complete yet. Basically, you only need to trim the doors enough so they fit flush inside the door opening, but ideally they should still be a bit "oversize" at this point. This is because until you install the hinges, window, and latch mechanisms the door won't find its final position. Once all that occurs, then you can trim the door down to its final (hopefully perfect) fit.
The first part of the initial trim is to make an "edge finder" out of two narrow strips of aluminum. The door is placed on the fuselage, and one half of the edge finder slides under the door skin, between it and the fuselage, and has a little tab on it that goes into the gap along the door opening. The other half of the edge finder has a small hole drilled in it to allow you to hold a sharpie in there while you slide the edge finder around the opening. In this way, you end up with a line drawn around the perimeter of the door that should very closely match the opening in the fuselage!
I should note that the plans have you make more use of the provided "scribe lines" visible in the outer door skin itself. However, as you'll see here, the lines are not very accurate or straight when compared to the actual cut needed. A number of builders before us have recommended not even paying attention to these lines as they are not very useful, so this is the route we took... we now see why!
Marking the L door for an initial cut (note the line drawn to leave an "ear" out for the alignment tab)
Scribe line visible here just above the blue line, quite a little ways away from (and not parallel to) the actual cut needed
Anyway, once the cutting of both doors was completed (this took several nights' worth of work), we had two doors that fit nicely inside their openings in the fuselage.
R door nested inside of and flush with the cabin cover
Forward side of the R door - the line isn't laser-straight yet, but it doesn't have to be at this point
After this was complete, the next step is to get the door hinges installed to secure the top edge of the doors to the cabin cover. This was pretty straightforward and we followed the plans here with no real deviations. For the hinge pin, they have you cut the threads off a long AN3 bolt which seemed kind of cheesy to me, but actually worked out pretty slick. For just a touch of extra style, I put the bolt in a drill and held it to the grinder to get rid of the hex-shaped head and ended up with a much nicer-looking, rounded-head hinge pin.
After a bunch of careful drilling, countersinking, and screw installation, we had our fist glimpse of the gull-wing doors in action!
RV-10 Gull-wing doors (broomstick sold separately)
Same doors, with the optional "human broomstick" upgrade
Neato! I have to say so far, this hasn't been as difficult as I had imagined it would be. Some of the steps are a pain to be sure, but really it's not too bad as long as you can let patience prevail. We got into a rhythm of working until we got either tired or frustrated, and then just left it for another day. Sometimes this took a few hours; other times we had had enough in 30 minutes. Whatever it was though, it always seemed easy enough to pick it back up the next day and continue. I don't have an "hours-so-far" count for you, but whatever it is, I'd say it's reasonable given the work required.
So now that we have the door hinges attached, we can start on the latch mechanism... yay!