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!