After a very long semester I'm back to working on the cub. Over thanksgiving we tore down the engine and shipped all the parts to Aircraft Specialties and the case to Divco. Dad and I were both pleasantly surprised by the way the engine looked on the inside, since it had been sitting since 1993 (!) at least. The crank passed initial inspections but the interior failed for 160hp, bummer. The last thing we have heard is that they are working on grinding it to see if it will make a 150hp and looking around for a 160hp crank, fingers crossed.
I would say out of all the things we've done so far I have learned the most from the engine work, I helped my dad put new cylinders on his cub a couple of years ago and he helped my do the head gaskets on my car but I had never actually seen the inside of the case with the cam and crank etc. Very cool! Even though I knew how it worked it helped a lot to see it all up close.
After Thanksgiving I went back to Fairbanks for 2 of the busiest weeks I have ever had between finals, projects, activities and all of the other miscellaneous obligations that seem like no big deal until they're all at the same time. When it was finally all over I drove back to Anchorage ready for some rest and to start getting some stuff done.
In the past week we have been working on the interior panels. Over the summer I made a bunch of paper patterns for them so we double checked those and cut them out of .020 2024.
To stiffen them up we borrowed a friend's bead roller. Lots of deliberation went into how to make the best looking beads, but luckily before we started going to town on them we started doing some research. We didn't know, but you need to pre-stretch the area that you are going to bead. Otherwise the piece will turn into a warped oil can that won't sit flat. Real professionals that have all of the tools use an english wheel to do their pre-stretch, but since we didn't have one of those we found some mismatching dies for the bead roller: one rounded, and instead of a female die, just a flat surface for the bottom. I tested it and it worked great! If I stretched on the opposite side of where I wanted the bead then did the real bead after on the correct side, the product was flat and much stiffer than it was before I started, success! Testing proved that you can bead deeper than your pre-stretch allows for though.
I started beading the actual panels a couple of days ago, I'm using a die that gives a step down on one side and I'm really happy with how they look so far! The narrower panels are easier because you don't have to contend with the throat depth of the roller, but if you're clever and try a dry run without clamping down the roller on the line you can make it work on the bigger panels. The pictures show the panels that are on the sides of the extended baggage, I have a few more done now, but it's a work in progress.
