Before I started sinking my teeth into prepping for the canard installation on the fuselage, I wanted to check how the fuselage longeron angles were looking.  Since there’s been some fairly significant swings in temps with the weather over the past couple days, I was curious to see if it had affected the front tire at all.  It didn’t and the fuselage is still locked at 0°.

After re-reading Chapter 12 in the plans on the canard installation, I then got to work on prepping as much as I could get in tonight for the upcoming canard install.

I started by rounding up my two AN3-20A bolts that will be modified to be used as the top canard tabs alignment pins.

I cut the heads off the bolts and then rounded them over some.  I’m not getting too particular here since I don’t plan on actually using these as alignment pins.  Instead, I’ll be going the route of a fair number of other builders who drill a hole all the way through the longeron doublers and then install a long AN3 bolt with a nutplate to secure the top tabs of the canard.  Reportedly, this makes installation & removal of the canard much easier, and I’m all about making things easier.

After finishing the alignment pins, I then started working on the nutplates that will be used to retain the main canard mounting bolts on the bottom mounting tabs.  Interestingly, Chapter 12 doesn’t describe any of the steps for making these nutplate assemblies, but instead merely refers the builder to the diagram on Page A7.  On A7 it shows a K1000-4 nutplate riveted to a AN970-4 washer.  The rivets actually appear to be drawn as Cherry pop rivets, but flush rivets are called for by part number.

To keep the nutplate centered on the washer, I used an AN4 bolt with a regular nut on the side opposite the nutplate.

I then drilled the holes using the nutplate as a guide.  You can see that these holes are very close to the edge, but I doubt it really matters much since compression will keep the nutplate tight against the washer.  Let alone the fact that this all gets permanently mounted  to the aft side of F22 under a ply of BID.

And here’s the final product.

Tomorrow it looks to have a good chance of being rainy during the first half of the day, so I’ll focus on prep work.  Then I’ll move into working on mounting the canard in the early afternoon.