AZ Bearhawk

Covering Ailerons and flaps

Taking a break from the airplane at the hangar I got to work on covering the ailerons and flaps. This is the exact same process as the rest of the fabric covering I’ve done so far.

It’s always cool to see how the fabric tightens right up with the iron.

Making good progress they’re all polybushed and ready for rib stitching.

My trusty helper Tori came out to help poke holes and to chase the needle while I rib stitched.

After finishing all the tapes, another paint booth was erected. One coat in the morning and one in the evening through all the stages of PolyBrush, PolySpray and finally Poly Tone.

Wingtip light mounts

I need to make some mounts for the wingtip lights. So I traced the outline of the lights onto some aluminum.

I also made the same trace onto some fiberglassing foam and contoured it to the wing shape.

Here it is glued in place on the wingtip.

Then I glued the aluminum reinforcements onto the foam. I put several holes in the aluminum to help the epoxy grip the aluminum.

Wingtips are short

After aligning the aileron and flap trailing edges to make sure they were straight and square, it because obvious that the wing tips weren’t long enough.

So I took some fiberglassing foam, created the proper shape and hot-glued it in place.

After some SuperFill to fill the gaps I sanded it all down to the proper shape in preparation for the actual fiberglass to cover it.

After fitting the ailerons and flaps to the wings we marked the hinge bracket locations and drilled them to their respective control surface. My friend Rusty came over and spent a day helping me drill all the nut plates for the brackets. Then we riveted on the reinforcement strips.

Next came the counter weights. I went to Ace and picked up some aluminum tube, then to Sportsmans Warehouse to pick up some #8 bird shot. I created a slurry of JB weld and shot to make a plug in one end of the tube. After curing, I alternated shot and epoxy until the tube was full to the top. After a few small adjustments I got exactly the right weight.

Finally the airplane has all it’s flight controls. Now on to aligning the trailing edges.

Windshield Fairing

Today my wife Cati showed up to help me make the fiberglass windshield fairing. First we used packing tap the make the fairing shape between he boot cowl and the windshield. Then we use mold release wax on the entire surface.

We cut the strips to the proper width and length. Then Cati went to work on wetting the resin then squeezing the excess out on a table. I took the strips and started laying them up on the windshield. 10 layers in all.

After curing for a day, I used masking tap the mark the edges. Then used a band saw to trim it up. Turned out much better than I would have imagined!

Cati is taking a well deserved break eating my lunch. 🙂

Interior Trim Panels

I once again used my arts and crafts skills to make pasteboard templates for the interior trim pieces. Here is the wing root on the inside of the cabin.

Here is the wing root interior piece with the fuel sight gage with a new orange ball that actually floats this time!

Here are the interior pieces for the forward and lower cockpit.

Here is the top piece that Matt from Alaska made up for me. You’d think these things would be easy to make, but it took a while! Turned out great though and gives nice contrast. It’s also very light.

Magneto trouble and an Alaskan visitor

Funny story. Matt was visiting from Alaska and wanted to save on shipping for some heavy tools he ordered. So he found me on the bear hawk forums and asked if he could have them shipped to my house so he could take them as checked luggage back to AK. And a great friendship was born!

To say thanks for housing his tools for a while, he offered to stop by and help wrench on my Bearhawk. We worked on a few odds and ends and he fabricated a few interior pieces. But the bulk of our time was spent fiddling with the magnetos!

To begin with the internal gears weren’t clocked right so we had to re-clock them. Then we found the impulse coupling was magnetized and wasn’t allowing the pawls to free fall. Then the right mag had a bad grounding issue that was intermittent. Matt was super patient and helped me noodle through these very perplexing issues.

After A LOT of fiddling, we finally decided to send off the left mag to have the impulse coupling replaced and deferred dealing with the right mag. More on that to follow. (Spoiler alert: I eventually went with electronic ignition on the right side).