Doors

We started work on the two doors for the plane.  The doors have frames that are made from aluminum tubing which slides over steel corner brackets that were provided by the factory.  The instruction manual did not provide good guidance on building the doors, but luckily there were some good tips already posted on the wingsforum that helped out.  Pictures from several other builders also helped point the way.

To set the gap around the doors, we first taped spacers that were approx 3/16 inch in height to various spots around the fuselage door openings.  We used pieces of tongue depressors as these spacers (a stack of 3, which was close to 3/16 inch).   We taped the door corner pieces in place with painter's tape, and then measured the distances between the corner pieces to determine how long to make the aluminum frame pieces.  We cut several 1/2" aluminum tubes to length, then deburred the ends. The door frames are made primarily from round tubes, except for one piece along the top that is made from square tubing (to accommodate the hinge).

We quickly found that the corner brackets for the door did not quite have the correct angles for a good fit on our fuselage.  After consulting the web, we found that this was a common issue and that "tweaking" (i.e. bending) the corner brackets is needed to get the doors to fit nicely in the openings.  We worked on the passenger door first, bending the brackets as needed so that the angles of the door fit perfectly within the frame.  We had some difficulties with this at first, but then settled on a nice method where we first drilled a hole in a piece of dense wood (we used a piece of Ipe wood left over from a deck project), clamped the wood in a vise, inserted one end of the steel corner bracket into the wood block, inserted a long screwdriver into the other end of the bracket for leverage, and finally bent it slightly as needed.  Several iterations of this process were used until each bracket was bent to the correct shape.

All the brackets for the right (passenger side) door were adjusted for a good fit, but we still have some work to do on the left side.  Hours: 6.0

Michael gently bending one of the corner pieces.

Spacers and alum door tubes held in place with blue tape