This morning I finished tweaking last night’s blog post & updated my to-do task sheet for mounting the canard.  Not a lot left to do on the actual canard mounting itself, but I will be working on mounting the elevators & fitting them to both the canard & the fuselage sidewalls.  I’ll then of course have to fill in some fuselage sidewall in the corner of the F22/F28 shelf once I account for where exactly the elevator tubes will traverse the fuselage side walls.

After getting the requisite administrivia out of the way, I took the canard out to the fuselage and mounted it with the AN4 bolts into the freshly floxed-in CNL bushings.  Wow, is that fit TIGHT!  I didn’t realize why it was SO tight until I tried sliding an AN4 bolt into one of the CNL bushings even without the canard on… Whew, that is tight tolerance!

As you can see my canard stayed level. I checked the sweep and am still showing about 1/8″ off on one side, but I’m certain I can clean that up.  I guess this morning’s canard mounting is truly the first real test, eh?!

Happy with this morning’s results, I was running around cleaning up & prepping to put the fuselage & wings back in the shop –which of course I still don’t have full on access to via the big garage door.  I then got a call from the garage door company saying that they were going to be a couple of hours late.  Well, enough time I sez to myself to flox in & glass the canard lift tab nut plates!

I grabbed some scrap BID and cut it into two 3″ circles, one BID ply for each nutplate assembly as per plans.

I prepped two slightly shorter AN4 bolts with a light coat of grease on the threads to keep those guys from becoming a permanent part of the nutplate assemblies, and then I pre-deployed my stuff to the fuselage.

After I was all prepped, I then whipped up some epoxy and flox with fast hardener and glassed these suckers in!  (Of course Marco called just as I started . . . persistent bugger in trying to slow my build down! Haha!)

Here’s another shot of the floxed & glassed canard lift tab K1000-4 nutplate assemblies. (Guess my aft side F22 needs some TLC… and cleanup, huh?)

Ok, THIS will be my last post for a few days.  The garage door guys just called and will be here in the next 30 minutes.  I have to finish packing and get read to drive to Chesapeake, VA to meet Marco and prep for our Long-EZ flight to RR tomorrow!

I’m going to post the following pics without commentary until later on, I think their self explanatory of me breaking down the airplane and putting into my garage that now has a working door!

Final mockup with upper cowling.

Shimming in wheel supports

Longerons still at zero degrees!

Removing wing bolts:

Wings detached

Moving fuselage back into shop:

Just wings . . .  again.

Left wing on wing dolly.

Getting there!

Both wings on wing dolly.  Note that I cut up some old carpet to make cradles in order to lift up the outboard wings to level.  Should come in handing while working on the ailerons.

Tight squeeze, but it all fits!

Side yard is back to normal!

Hope to see you at Rough River!  Cheers!

I started out today by double checking my BID spacer pad layups on the front side of the F28 bulkhead.  The left-side 12-ply spacer came out fine, but the single ply on the right side seemed to have some issues (i.e. delam around the #10 hole) … no worries since this is mainly for spacing and I can clean it up later.

I redrilled the #10 hole into the canard the doubler on the face of F28 (I also redrilled the #10 hole into the top alignment tabs).

Here’s a closeup of the 12-ply BID spacer laid up on the front side of F28.  Just as a point of note, since this a spacer and not structural I used my old batch of MGS 335 on this so as to not waste the good stuff!

With the new spacers built into the airframe on the face of F28, I gave them a test run when I re-installed the canard.

The left side alignment tab was leaning forward just a hair more than I liked, creating a gap towards the top where it should have been much closer to the F28 12-ply BID spacer.

I clamped the left alignment tab tight against the new 12-ply BID spacer on F28 & then very carefully hit it with a heat gun.

I left the clamp on the alignment tab for probably 45 minutes and when I finally popped off the clamp, the alignment tab looked much better . . . well . . . aligned!  ha!

I’ll make a point here that after installing the canard this go around I then measured my left and right sweep from my center measuring block clamped to the top CL of the CS spar, as I had a myriad of times.  However, I did it while I still had the left side alignment tab clamped tight… and it showed.  I’ve been normally getting 0.06″ delta max between each side on sweep, and this time it was about 1/8″.  This of course went back to normal as soon as that clamp came off, although it may have been exaggerated just a hair by the shenanigans of that 1-ply of BID on F28 over on the right!

With sweep looking good, and it being the first official trial run of the day on the canard, I fired up my water level and immediately got this!  It may be a good day Maynard!  I also confirmed this with my digital level at the canard CL.

Right side water level:

Left side water level:

I then honed in on setting the incidence.  I’ve come to the conclusion that somewhat like my fuselage, my canard too has a very slight twist.  This may be (in part) due to the fact that I got the cores from Feather Light and they are still using the hotwire method off the original templates.  Don’t get me wrong, they make a quality product, but there were some minor idiosyncrasies with the canard cores.  Plus, obviously my being a Neanderthal builder clearly doesn’t help! Ha!

I have to tell you that I would probably freak out a bunch more if I didn’t consistently see Burt making allowances for us lesser beings in the plans.  Chapter 12 says if one has a twist in one’s canard, then one should mount it with that in mind and average out the twist in one’s canard: “If your canard has a slight twist, set the average incidence equal to the longerons.”

Yes, there are those among us who would willingly cast the first “there is no such thing as a slight twist!” and/or “rebuild! rebuild!” stones, but I am more of the mind & in line with many of our pragmatic generals who say things like: “perfection is the enemy of good enough.”  Not that I don’t strive for perfection, I just clearly fall short quite often in this nebulous world that we call a Long-EZ build.  Thus, as John Roncz himself (relayed via Marc Zeitlin) once told a pummeled-by-peers Cozy builder: “see how it flies before you change anything” (paraphrased)… I think I too will do the same.

End Rationalization Transmission!

Therefore, without further ado, here are my incidence readings, starting from the canard right outboard side and moving to the left side.  You’ll note the right is LE high and then eventually makes it way to LE comparatively lower on the outboard left side.  One point of note, after messing with this for hours, my tolerance standard became anything within the inner most hash marks on the level.

One final point of note.  I find it amazing that I can sight down the canard and barely see any twist, with all look nice & laser straight, but this template definitely does do its job by finding that twist in regards to incidence.

Right canard: Outboard to inboard.

Left canard: Inboard to outboard.

I spent another half hour tweaking the SWEEP, DIHEDRAL and INCIDENCE.  To tweak the dihedral & incidence just a hair more, I clamped the right side canard down just a smidge… which totally did the trick.

With everything looking good and all my variables locked in place, I pulled the trigger and drilled out the canard main mounting tabs with the long #10 bit. [Note: Although it looks like I’m ‘free-handing’ it here with the drill, I’m not.  I have small level with “V” grooves on the bottom that I actually hold on the drill bit shaft and I also set a 2×4 90° from the canard face close to the drill.  It may not be a perfect 90°, but it’s pretty darn close.]

I started with the right side bolt and made sure everything stayed aligned by quickly checking my alignment variables again.

With the right bolt in place, everything still looked fine so I drilled the left side mounting tab with the #10 bit.  Below is a shot with both AN3 bolts in place on the main canard mounting tabs.

Looking a lot more official on the canard mount with AN3 bolts actually keeping the mounting tabs in place to F22!

With the lower tab pilot holes drilled and the correct position of the upper alignment tabs confirmed, it was then time to glass the aft & lower side of the alignment tabs with 4 plies of BID.

I started by sanding a radius at the Birch plywood tabs and the canard TE junction as per plans.

I then laid up 4 plies of BID on each lower side of the canard onto the tabs, and peel plied the layups.

Here are the tabs after I pulled the peel ply, razor cut the overhanging glass & then sanded the edges .

I then re-drilled the #10 hole into the alignment tabs.

I gathered up my CN2s (that I bought from the Cozy Girrrls).

I then drilled the out #10 holes in the alignment tabs to 1/4″, since the outside diameter of each CN2 bushing is 0.243″.

I used wet flox to install the CN2s into the upper alignment tabs.

Here’s a close up shot of a CN2 installed into the upper alignment tab.

My garage door spring snapped so I worked that issue (thanks Murphy!) for about 45 minutes before bringing the new & improved canard out to test on the fuselage.  The CN2s kicked the tops of the alignment tabs forward just a bit, but everything still lined up just fine.

I don’t have any action shots of drilling out the #10 holes on the canard main mount tabs to 1/4″, but here’s the end result below: AN4 1/4″ bolts in their respective holes!

And at this point, I would definitely say the canard is OFFICIALLY MOUNTED!

Of course there is still much work left to be done!  I left the canard in place for a while to give the CN2s a chance to really cure in place, and then after about an hour I moved the canard off its shelf and out of the way in order to drill the 1/4″ holes out to 5/8″ using the spot face tool.

And here are the new & improved 5/8″ canard mounting holes.

And a bit closer shot of each side.

I then inserted the CNL bushings into the freshly drilled 5/8″ mounting holes to mark them for trimming.

I then trimmed both CNLs down on the table saw just as I did with the LWA9s for the wing to CS spar mounting, and then whipped up some wet flox & mounted them into F22.

Here’s a shot of the glow coming from the heat lamp in the nose used for keeping the CNLs warm during curing.

Here’s the same pic, only this time I used a flash.

Unrelated to mounting the canard, tonight I finally go that lower cowling mounted so that I could mark up the firewall for trim.

I had to lean way over into the cowling in order to mark the lower line without disturbing the taped-in-place cowling.

I took this shot just to get an idea of what the bottom profile of the plane will look like.

Another thing that I did that is not shown in these pics is I ran a line from one wing TE corner to the other.  This let me measure from the back face of the spar to the string to determine the sweep.  I determined that I’m only 0.1″ short at the BL23 mark at the very inboard wing, and 0.4″ short on my wings’ sweep over the entire wing span: BL175.6 vs the plans BL 176.  Again, not bad and I’ll take it!

Tomorrow will be my last transmission for a few days.  I’ll be heading down south to meet up with Marco and then we’ll both fly to Rough River in his new Long-EZ.  I’ll most likely not build or post again (except maybe a quick wrap-up tomorrow) until Monday evening!

If you’re going to Rough River, SEE YOU THERE!

Today I started off clearing off the micro & finishing material from the top TE of the canard where the upper alignment tabs need to be glassed in.  I marked the spots first, for the right side, then the left . . .

And then cleared out the finish and sanded it down in prep for 5 plies of BID.

Although I didn’t take any “before” pics, I then did the same thing for the bottom side of the canard.  The alignment tabs will get 4 plies of BID on the aft/bottom side of the canard.

After checking the fuselage and spar to ensure all was still square, I then mounted the canard on the fuselage.  It seemed after the rain yesterday that the airplane had settled a bit, and it may have ever so slightly.  But my measurement across the aft ends of the longerons today revealed some spar-to-longeron mounting glass that was sticking up just a hair that would cause some erroneous level readings yesterday.

In addition, I used a very simple Side A-to-Side B water level on the canard today, as well as using levels to ensure that it is level from side to side.

Here’s the right side water level showing it aligned with the canard TE.

I still had to shim up the right side about 0.160″ to get the canard level.  A little more than my estimated 1/8″ required to offset my twisted fuselage, but I’ll live with it vs. rebuilding my fuselage!

I wanted to show a pic of the gap between the canard and F22.  Today I plan on minimizing that gap by contouring the sides of the fuselage to match the bottom-side canard profile.

In fact, I dug out Template “E” to help me do just that.  First, I measure the normal lower profile of the canard, making a few alignment marks along the bottom edge of Template “E”.

Then, I figured out how much I needed to lower the left side canard and marked those lines below the bottom edge line of Template “E”.

I then moved the canard off the F22 “shelf” so that I could have access to sand out the bottom F22 profile.  This happened at least 20 times today, trial and error being the order of the day!

With the lower marks in place, I simply matched the lower straight edge of Template “E” to the lower marks and then marked along the top edge of it which gave me the correct contour I needed for the bottom of the canard.

I then sanded down a significant portion of the area above the profile line above, and then kept checking for the high points (as shown below)… marked those and proceeded to sand them… with prejudice!  Again, this process was repeated countless times!

Here’s a shot of the fuselage sidewall cutouts.  Notice the left is much deeper than the right sidewall.  Which accounts for my lopsided fuselage (ahhh, the sins of the past….).

Here’s a couple more shots with the canard in place, from below.

As I did hundreds of times today, I then rechecked the level on the top of the canard.  I was having a devil of a time getting the canard to stay level whenever I tweaked the incidence.  Of course the Roncz canard mounts with the lower tabs at an angle (unlike the GU canard), so keeping the bottom tabs tight wasn’t allowing me to get the canard Leading Edge (LE) nose up for the proper incidence.  The whole herding cats thing was in full swing here, so I decided to minimize my variables and work with the known quantities I had on hand.

To keep the lower mounting tabs clamped, but then still be able to dial in my incidence by getting the canard TE down –thus, in essence the LE up– I decided to use my upper alignment tabs to do just that, align the canard!  So with some trial & error, and the main mounting tabs secured with clamps, I was able to use the height of the upper alignment tabs to dial in the correct incidence WHILE at the same time keeping correct sweep and level.

Of course this is NOT the order that the plans have you do all this, since in the plans you drill a #10 pilot hole through the lower tabs first, then mount the upper alignment tabs later. But the original plans are dealing with a straight-flat-bottomed GU canard that required no contouring of the fuselage sides.  I tried to prognosticate any future issues by doing it this way, and I couldn’t think of anything that would come back to bite me, so I proceeded to drill, trim & mount the Birch plywood (vs foam) for the upper canard alignment tabs.

That kept the canard sweep & the level dialed in.  But I of course re-checked both to ensure all was good!

Continuing on with my working the known variables theme, I went ahead and glassed the front mating face of F28 to dial in my sweep with the newly mounted upper alignment tabs. I figure I’d work the canard install elements in the same way they are presented in Chapter 12 of the plans: SWEEP ⇒ LEVEL ⇒ INCIDENCE.

It may be a bit difficult to see in the pic below, but I then cut wedges in the foam sidewall uprights that are adjacent to F28.

I then filled these foam wedges with flocro just prior to laying up 12 plies of BID on the left side (remember, I need to bring this side face out 0.155″) and then laid up one ply BID on the right side.  I was going to only layup 11 plies of BID on the left side, but went ahead and added one more so that I could the glass the right side with 1 ply of BID as well.

I had already wetted the 12 plies (in 4 sets 3 plies) of BID out before filling in the foam with flocro, so when I got back into the shop I merely squeegeed out the excess epoxy.

I then cut each set of the 3 plies of BID in prep for layup.

Here’s a shot of the heat lamp on the 12 ply BID layup.  Let’s just say that it cured fairly quickly!

With the F28 bulkhead spacers in place, I then set my sights on glassing the front side of the upper alignment tabs with 5 plies of BID each.  I do have to state that my 5 min glue must be old because it was still a bit rubbery even after about 25 min.  I’m only going to layup the front side BID so that if need be I can heat up the tabs and move them forward or aft.  Not an optimal way of doing this most likely, but I really saw no other way of dialing in the incidence without spending an enormous amount of time making wedges for the lower mounting tabs…which just didn’t seem nearly as efficient as doing it this way.

I sanded away the gummy 5 min epoxy on both tabs…

Then wetted out 2 sets of 3-ply BID and 2 sets of 2-ply BID to give me a total of 5 plies for the layups for both the left & right tabs.

I then laid up the forward tab faces with 5 plies of BID, after troweling in some dry flox fillets in the mating corners.  I then peel plied the lower, horizontal part of the layup for a smooth transition into the canard top surface.

After a couple of hours, I then razor trimmed the upper tab glass.

Here’s a shot of the left upper tab after I razor trimmed it.

I did do one thing today not canard related: I used my Fein saw to remove the CS118 plate in the back seat in prep for moving the control stick mount just a hair inboard!

Tomorrow I plan on moving out as much as possible to get the canard mounted to the fuselage.

Much to do before Rough River!

Today was quite the rainy day, at least up until about 1700.  I started out this morning by doing some much needed updates on this website.  That took well over 2 hours.  No worries though.  I had plenty of time to finish any administrivia tasks due to the rain forecast that kept slipping later as to when the rain was going to stop.  Originally the rain was due quit about 1300, but alas, that was not to be.

I used my time indoors to write out a detailed To-Do list for the canard installation.  I reread Chapter 12 of the plans, reread the install section of the Roncz Canard Installation Instructions, and then did some online crosschecking of some of my fellow Long-EZ builders’ blogs.

One thing I noted was on Dave Berenholtz’s blog, which was that he drilled holes into the AN970-4 washers that serve as the base for the K1000-4 nutplates — the entire assembly used for mounting the main 1/4″ canard bolts.  He drilled the holes as flox anchors, which is of course a common practice for Clickbonds.  Since there is understandably a fair amount of torque applied to these nutplate assemblies, I decided it was worth the 10 minutes to drill these flox anchor holes.

After cleaning and organizing the shop for about a good hour, it was time to take down the canard from its storage perch on high.

I carefully took it down and set it on a bed of cardboard & scrap blue wing foam pieces.  I then spent a good half hour removing the elevators.

Before hauling the canard out to the plane, I went ahead and drilled 3/16″ holes into the spruce longeron doubler (actual doubler not shown here, just F28).  As per plans, I’ll run a #10 drill bit into these holes, which are for inserting the 3/16″ canard alignment pins that the canard upper tabs mate to.  I’ll be using these alignment pins to mount the canard, but then I’ll modify the canard doubler by adding a wedge to square it off, drill this hole all the way through, then install a K1000-3 nutplate on the aft side of the newly extended/shaped canard doubler. The mechanism for keeping the top tabs in place will be a longer AN3 bolt that will simply screw into the face of the top mounting tab (with a washer of course), through the doubler and into the nutplate assembly on the aft side of the doubler.

You may note by the chicken scratch marking below that I missed the memo on shaping the front of the top longeron & fuselage correctly.  I will go back and correct that, I just wanted to get the canard mounted first.

Mike Beasley had this little contraption in his build photos, which is nothing more than a nail mounted on the marked center line of a scrap piece of wood, that is then mounted on the CS Spar’s CL.  This is an EZ method for having a standard reference point for helping determine sweep while mounting the canard.

I also wanted to temporarily mount the firewall, which required the trimming of the end glass hanging from the layup I did to mount the CS Spar to the fuselage.  I marked the glass, as you can see in the pics below, in order to have a reference line while cutting the glass.

I then used the Fein saw to trim up the dead glass.  After trimming the glass, I hit the edges with my sanding block.

It was then time to mount the firewall on the fuselage.  Uh, just one slight issue.  When I marked up the CS spar with the fuselage attached back in 2013, apparently I did it with the firewall off the fuselage.  Thus my lines were a hair farther out (say, 0.03″ to 0.04″) than if the firewall had been mounted in place. Doh!

Well, it was fairly tight, but with the help of a “persuader” (rubber mallet) the firewall went back on. Besides my one little spacing SNAFU, everything else with the firewall looks fine!

With the firewall back in place, and although it was nearly dark, I decided to get the canard onto the fuselage to at least collect some actionable intelligence for tomorrow.  I should note that besides having to spend half an hour getting the rainwater out of my “canoe” earlier, the soft ground also allowed the entire wing/spar/fuselage set-up to settle and thus move off the 0° mark in both the fwd/aft and left/right axes by a whopping 0.1°.  I’ll attend to the leans tomorrow, but for tonight I just wanted to get a general idea of what shimming I was going to have to do, and answer the question: “What size spacers (shims) do I need?”

Below you can see that for sweep I’ll need about 0.15″ (2 small Popsicle sticks) on the left side face of F28 for the canard to be even.  With these spacers in place, I got 114-1/16″ for both left & right sides from my spar CL reference point block to the outboard forward corner of the elevator cutout.  From the aft outboard corner of the wing I got 174″ on the dot on the right side, and about 1/32″ less than that on the left side.

Also, just as a point of note, I remeasured the aft outboard corner of both wings to the tip of the pitot tube and am still spot on at 247-5/8″ for each side.

To level the canard at the spar caps, it look likes I’ll need to add a shim/spacer about 0.165″ thick to the right side fuselage.  I’ll have to tweak this since I’ll most likely have to contour the sides of the fuselage immediately below the canard to get the canard to set in correctly, at which point I’ll merely make the right side contour 0.165″ higher than the left.

I realized I hadn’t got a pic of the canard on the fuselage, so even though it was fully dark outside, I took this shot.

My final official act of the evening was cutting a myriad of BID patches for the upper alignment tabs and the 0.15″ spacer that will be glassed to the left front of F28 (after determining actual spacer thickness & confirming the number of plies required).

With the majority of preliminary tasks out of the way, I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to get the canard mounted onto the fuselage tomorrow.  If not tomorrow, I’d say definitely by the end of Wednesday . . . as long as the weather cooperates!.

Today was a light work day since I’m heading out to Dulles for the annual Airplane Pull & aircraft display.  I spent over an hour cleaning up the surrounding area around the airplane (I think I can say that now!).

I wanted to get a pic of what I didn’t last night, and that’s of the inboard holes filled with foam & micro and then glassed over with 2 plies of BID.  You can see that this is the initial shot & exactly what I saw when I pulled the heat blanket off for the first time.

Here’s a shot immediately following me pulling all the peel ply.  I haven’t cleaned up the layups so it’s all stiff a but rough.  I am, however, very happy with the quality of the layups.

Since I found out last night that we may have a chance of thunderstorms this weekend, and I’ll be very much out & about, I decided to really ensure that the tarps were secured well to keep the sun off the raw composite surfaces, and to minimize any moisture… especially in the nose — which I covered with plastic.

Tomorrow won’t be much of a build day either, but I do plan on getting a fair amount of research and a final review in on mounting the canard.

Today I hit another HUGE milestone in my Long-EZ build!  I mounted the fuselage to the CS Spar/Wings assembly!!

Before I get into the fuselage stuff, just a quick side note that I used some of the left over flox from installing the LWA9s to repair the power cord wrap tang on my miter saw that I broke getting it out of the shed yesterday.  I let it cure overnight and it looks great.

First, I spent about an hour organizing & cleaning the shop.  I then spent over 45 minutes cutting the BID tapes for securing the fuselage to the CS spar.  I also cut out the 3″x3″ BID pads to cover up the inboard 5/8″ pilot holes I drilled on the CS Spar to facilitate drilling the wing bolt holes.  Since the front face of the spar makes up the aft wall of the fuel tank, then the inboard holes clearly need to be re-glassed.

To get the fuselage into place on the spar, I needed to get rid of the sawhorse out from under the spar.

To do this with least amount of hassle and disturbance, I simple cut the 2 front legs of the saw horse.  Since I had routed the water level lines through the legs of the saw horses, the most expedient way of freeing the water level tubes was to simply cut the cross members of the sawhorse.  You can see all this in the pics below.

Voila!  Here’s the saw horse with its front legs trimmed down and easily removed out from under the spar without disturbing the spar.

Here are the wings & CS spar, with the spar out in free space and held in place only by the wing bolts.

I then needed to get the fuselage out to the wings/spar setup.  Here’s my fuselage on climb out! Of course I really lifted the nose high to get the table out from under it.

This is the first time my fuselage has ever ventured out into the world (aka “beyond the garage”).

Looks “long” with that nose on there.  Love it!

Getting ready to back ‘er up.

Doing a little 3-wheelin’!

Over the storm drain & through the woods . . .

Ah, this is where this belongs!  Looks awesome with the fuselage set in place on the spar. It was pretty EZ to line it up because I had taken some time when I mocked this all up in Germany back in 2013 to align the fuselage on the spar, at which point I marked the spar with alignment lines.  I had actually forgotten about those alignment lines and seriously didn’t even notice them until today.  What a nice surprise!

Spar is still level Left & Right.

Here’s me re-checking the CS spar level, left & right sides.  I don’t have pics, but the incidence on top of the spar looked spot-on as well.

Ah, nice & level across the longerons!

Now, the nose was a bit high so I ran into the garage, got my battery and mounted it in the nose.

I then raised the nose gear until the longerons were level at 0°.

Then rechecked the left longeron to confirm 0°.

I tried to use the laser level to shoot down the CL of the fuselage, but it was just too bright out to see the laser mark, although I could see well enough to line up the spar with the back of the front seat CL mark.  I then ran a string to confirm all was centered between spar & fuselage.

I do have to admit that a persistent problem that has plagued me all these years is that my fuselage has a slight twist to it.  It essentially “droops” down to the front left just a hair.  It’s about 0.2° low on the left side at F22.  There’s nothing I can do about it, and I even tried to load up the fuselage with offsetting weights to cure (pardon the pun) this problem when I post-cured the fuselage, but it made scant difference.  The main issue it causes is with mounting the canard, and it simply means that the canard may be lopsided a hair when mounted to F22.  However, we’re talking about the canard being mounted maybe 1/8″ higher on the left side.  This issue is one major reason why I want to mount the canard with the wings & spar in place so that it will be straight in relation to the wings!  Not a horrible issue, just one to note.

All-in-all, it only took me about 30 minutes total to align the fuselage with the CS Spar.  In addition to the steps above, I made a whole slew of measurements from the aft outboard corner of the spar to instrument panel & F22.  Measured from the front outboard end of the wings to the the panel & F22.  I also measured the aft outboard TE of the wing to the very tip of pitot tube: 246-3/4″ on the left, and 246-1/2″ on the right.  I looked at all my other measurements and noted that indeed my fuselage was tracking just a hair to the right.  A very small nudge on the nose and all my measurements were pretty much exact, if not within a 1/8″ of an inch off at a point or two.  I remeasured from the aft outboard TE of the wing to the pitot tube and got a perfect 246-5/8″ on each side.  It was clearly time to get down to brass tax and get this fuselage mounted while my fuselage-spar alignment was spot on!

As I started the actual attachment process, one thing that I had going on –since I made the spar cutouts on the aft fuselage exactly to the plan’s dimensions– is the foam on the fuselage is higher than the spruce firewall/gear hard point (LWY).  I could just fill this area with flox, but I’d rather use a thin piece of spruce as a spacer. I measured the gap at  0.150″.

I grabbed a good piece of scrap spruce and then set up my saw for right around 0.150″ (or ~5/32″).

And made two 5.7″ spacers to go under the spar.  I would have preferred 6.5″ long spacers, but this piece of spruce was the best I had available, so I used it.

In prep for glass, I sanded all the areas that would be getting BID tapes.

I then laid up the BID tapes!

My fuselage & CS spar are now officially one assembly!!

I’ll of course wait to layup any glass on the inside longerons until I mount 10-ply BID pads for the engine mount extrusions.

And here it is, the wings mounted to the CS Spar now mounted to the Fuselage!  Yes, it’s bit cluttered around the plane, but I’m in the process of building it . . . if ya haven’t heard! ha!

Also, for those folks concerned about me not using a sawhorse up front and relying on that “squishy” front tire to maintain the fuselage level, it did fine.  To account for that, I used fast hardener –which let me tell you, is fast!– and worked in phases starting from the bottom spar connect points moving upwards.  I also rechecked the level and center measurements a number of times.  Hours after I was finished it was still sitting at 0º on the longerons.

I then cut a 1-1/2″ x 1-1/2″ piece of 2024 Aluminum for one of my upper engine mounts.  I trimmed it down on the table saw to 1-1/4″ on the leg that will be sticking upright as it is mounted on top of the CS Spar.  Just a personal preference to not have such an oversized extrusion mounted in the cockpit area.

I then cut the inboard 5/8″ pilot holes on the spar –used for drilling the inboard wing bolt holes– out to 1″ since the edges of the 5/8″ pilot holes were really oily & dirty from all the metal shavings & the spotface pilot rod rubbing against it.

Here are my 3″x3″ pre-pregged 2-ply BID pads, and the 1/4″ foam I used to back fill the holes.

I don’t have any pics yet, but I micro’d in the foam into the holes and then glassed up the 2-ply BID pads over the holes. It was dark and I really couldn’t get any decent pics of this, so I’ll get them tomorrow.

I then set up a heat blanket & a couple of heat lamps on the new layups.  I won’t be working tomorrow since I have my EAA meeting and then will be heading to Dulles for an airplane display event.

On Sunday evening amidst watching football I’ll be prepping to start mounting the canard on Monday!