Ready for paint!

-

 This week Carlos is getting the plane ready for paint. Its going to be really exciting to see the final product. Here are some picture of his work in progress.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Customizations

-
Image
Before we started our build we selected  several custom options for our plane. Strangely enough, there is no list of all possible options. We just had to keep asking to find out (HINT: someone at TAF should make a list). Anyway here are a few options we selected as part of our order:  Split Rear Seat - This will allow for three passengers and luggage. We also plan to make the rear seat removable because we most often fly without any passengers and lots of luggage. Extra Long Seat Rails - My family is really tall, so we asked for extra long seat rails. This will allow them to move the seat back a few extra inches to accommodate for those long legs. Foot Pedals - The standard it comes with really cheap looking rudder bars. It turns out there is a option to get custom aluminum Sling branded pedals. They are on backorder. Besides the options from the factory, now that we are building we have learned about many small modifications that other builders are making. Here are some th...
Read more

Floor under Back Seat

-
Image
For some strange reason, there is no floor under the back seat. I guess Sling expects the back seat to cover any cold air leaks and stop stuff from falling into the space below. This seems really sub-optimal, dangerous, and needs to be addressed. Without a floor, the seat belt buckles can be pushed through the seat and fall into the space below which houses many important linkages that are needed to fly the plane, so that could be bad. Also there is a huge amount of cold air leaking into the cabin from underneath the seat. To fix this I decided to add aluminum floor panels under the rear seats, to close up the space. They are mounted with rivnuts, covered in carpet, and easily removed for inspection. The final result shown in the first picture.  It is an easy build; you need a rivnut tool, metal scissors , rubber mallet, and a few others. Measuring, fitting, and installing requires various advanced yoga poses, but it is doable. First I made a cardboard template for the two panels, ...
Read more

Nylon Brake Lines

-
Image
During the built of N333ST we decided to upgrade the standard brakes to Matco brakes. I am not entirely sure why we decided to do this, but I think we believed that these brakes would provide superior braking power. In hindsight I now realize that the plane has plenty of stopping power using the standard brakes. Anyway, trouble started during flight testing. After 10 hours or so we noticed a brake fluid leaking from one of the brakes. A friendly mechanic fixed the leak by tightening the fittings that connect the nylon brake lines to the caliper. Unfortunately, the problem came back after we finished flight testing and had flown home. We assumed (incorrectly) that the nylon line was not fitted properly into the caliper, and the bent was causing a leak. To fix this I ordered a bunch of brake line parts online and tried to install a contraption to better line up the brake line with the fitting. Each time, this required bleeding the brakes, which in itself is a pain in the rear. Long stor...
Read more