Today was all about refining the operation of the nose hatch latch —interspersed with a good bit of sanding on the newly applied micro on the turtledeck.

After designing an angle bracket to attach to the front of the existing canopy latch that will secure a spring plunger to pop the nose hatch up and off the latch catch, I then 3D printed a model of it.  As the model was 3D printing out, I went to a local hardware store and picked up a few springs and a rubber top cap for my plunger.

After testing out the spring plunger on the 3D printed mockup (which broke after a few cycles), I confirmed my design was good and milled a piece of 1/16″ thick 6061 aluminum angle.  Here’s a couple of machining “action shots.”

And here we have the spring plunger installed on the face of the nose hatch latch. It definitely works a treat now (see video below).

I’ve also been designing and testing an intermediate nose hatch latch cable assembly that will have a pivot setup to allow me to get much straighter pull vectors on both cable and latch assembly.

And here’s a video I did up covering pretty much all my current issues that require some tweaking on the nose hatch operation.

I also did well over an hour of sanding on the turtledeck, knocking down the freshly added micro down to about 80% (guestimate) done.  I will definitely need some touchup micro here and there before a final sanding and then on to epoxy wipes.

Pressing forward!