Many of my peeps out there may have heard that we have Tropical Storm Debby crawling up the Eastern coast of the U.S. with high winds and rain.  I honestly haven’t been tracking it much other than if it will affect a quick trip down to Florida this coming weekend that Jess and I are taking.  That being said, we’ve had rain over the last couple of days… and lots of it.  And when there is what is akin to a torrential downpour, more than the ground can naturally absorb, then my shop floods to varying degrees.  Normally just in a small area in front of the air compressor closet, and maybe a bit in front of my epoxy mixing station.

This time however I was met by flooding well up under the airplane.  And although I do have a mop and bucket for smaller isolated flood puddles, this would have taken way too long to deal with… especially since it was still raining! [Also note the insulation panel under the centerline of the plane: knocked down by the squirrels in the ever-ongoing Squirrel Wars of the Salty Shores Shop].

In short: no welding today.

Not that I’m sure that it would matter if I could weld, given that after a few rounds of dialing in Version 3 of the upper right exhaust pipe bracket I assessed that it would need to be modified too much, causing the top corner mounting screw holes to drop down too close to the edge of the underlying aluminum baffle.  I’m really not sure why the top bracket turned so wonky on me (pic 1).  But, instead of pressing a bad position I simply noted the required configuration changes (e.g. fill the “new” gaps around the sleeves), created and tweaked the Version 4 mockup in cardboard first (pic 2), then uploaded that into Fusion 360 CAD.

By this point I’m getting fairly quick at uploading a cardboard mockup into Fusion 360 CAD, then tracing out the part to model it up before I then post process the new CAD part to create a CAM file for the plasma cutting table (FireControl program).  I then set up and plasma cut the now 3rd top right 316 stainless steel bracket (sigh).

I then cleaned up the edge dross off the bracket, drilled the corner mounting holes, and did some dialing in on the bracket for a few rounds.  Clearly this one is fitting much better right out of the gate.

I’ve got another few minor rounds of dialing in before I’m ready to mount the K1000-3 platenuts that will in turn allow mounting both top and bottom right side exhaust pipe brackets; which will require removing the exhaust pipes.  Since the rain was still coming down hard and I couldn’t get under the plane (in any EZ fashion) to remove the pipes with all the standing water underneath it, I simply called it a night and will tackle it again tomorrow.

Pressing forward… or at least trying to!