Plane relocation, plus work on flaps, wiring, fairings

 In prep for moving our plane to Sanford (TTA), we completed fabrication of travel struts.  Two rear struts had previously been made, but we made a couple of front struts that attach from a landing gear mount to the spar tube.  This adds some support when the wings are folded and make it safer for travel.  

Front travel strut attached

We actually unfolded the wings to load the plane on the trailer as this keeps the center of gravity forward of the main gear.  Once the plane was on the trailer and the front tied down, we folded the wings back and installed the travel struts.  We then finished tying it down and successfully transported it to Sanford.  This was a big accomplishment as this is the first time we trailered it with wings folded.  This is the airport where we will be performing our initial test flights.

Removing travel struts after towing

Wing unfolding

Plane at new home

Some other work we did on the airplane is listed below: 

A thin plastic corrugated tube was inserted through the front spar of each wing for use as a protective conduit for wiring.  Wires were routed through these tubes in prep for wiring up the wingtip lights.

The flap pulleys were installed and torqued down.  The flab cables were fabricated and installed.  We ran into a problem on the right wing as the flap wire had inadvertently wrapped around the aileron cable, which probably happened sometime during the paint process.  This was easy to fix as we just removed one pulley and had enough room to fish the wire back where it was supposed to go.

The flaps were tested and we found that there is too much friction in the system, as the flap spring couldn't always pull the flaps all the way back up when retracted.  After further investigation, we found that some of the bushings are not rotating freely, so we will need to ream out the holes just a tiny bit more to enable these to work correctly. 

An aluminum fairing was made to cover the gap between the fuselage and butt rib.  Holes were drilled and clecos installed.  This will be painted before final installation.

Some work was started on some fiberglass fairings that cover the area between the butt ribswing and windshield.  The right fairing was trimmed a bit, but more work still needs to be done on this.  Hours: 30