AZ Bearhawk

It became necessary to yet again rent a uhaul truck.  Cati and Jessica helped me carefully lift and place the wings in the truck.  To make sure we didn’t accidentally hurt them, we took them one at a time to the airport.

We prepped the wings with MEK, scotchbrite, metal surface cleaner and alodine. They’re now ready for paint!

First the tack coats of epoxy primer then the polytone.  So far so good!

After letting the final coat dry for 7 hours I taped for the blue leading edge.

The blue paint is a bit scary.  The pigment is so potent.  Even one spec in the wrong place will ruin a paint job!

Remarkably it turned out great!!!!

Here they are in daylight.  They look pretty good if I do say so myself!

Tor helped me build another paint booth.  As you can see this one took up the whole garage.  Much easier when you don’t also have all the other airplane parts in there.

My family once again came to help make short work of prepping the wings for paint.  They had contests to see who could do the best and fastest job.

My trusty build helper, Tori, helped me make some wing rotisseries.  I saw this method on Jared Yates build log. It worked great!

Then I built a component that used the saw horses as platforms to hold and rotate the whole thing.

Finding Cessna air conditioning vents parts was hard!  Even when I did find them, they were awfully expensive!  So I decided it was high time to buy that 3D Printer I always wanted.

First I took a picture of the wing so I could get the shape.  Then I uploaded it to a CAD program and traced the shape.

Then I designed the rest of it in CAD.  Kinda fun!

Here’s the finished project! I printed it out of ABS plastic.

I did the same for the wing root mounts.

Pretty cool, huh!

I positioned the fiberglass wingtips and matched drilled them to the wing.  Then My girls and I made quick work of all the nutplates.

For Christmas break Joey, Timmy and my dad came out to visit.  I promptly put them to work!  Joey was afraid that rivet pulling would be overly complicated.

Here my dad is pulling a few rivets where there wasn’t room to get a bucking bar in there.  He’s using his rivet puller from when he did AC work as a young man.  Ah the memories it must have brought back!  🙂

With Timmy gone I had to finish the trailing edge stiffeners myself.  Takes a lot longer to do this cleco, rivet, drive and repeat by my self.

My brother Timmy has been a tremendous help on this plane.  He lives in California and makes the drive out here to AZ to help on the bigger parts of the build.

After I completed the internals of the wings and double checked every cotter pin, stop nut and nut torque we started the riveting of the top wing skin.

Amazingly we got the hang of the communication required and got into a rhythm.  It took two days to finish both wings, but it turned out great with only two small dents from wandering bucking bars.