[tommy321]

Picked up an order at Great Hobbies this evening... Thanks Dave!

Man... covering an airplane this size is not cheap:



Tom

[tommy321]

First things first, we need calories to fuel a long Saturday afternoon build session. I just found this one at the local liquor store, and it's definitely a keeper. It has as much flavour as it looks like it does.



With that out of the way, we get onto finishing the door.

Building the door starts by gluing the framing parts down around the inner door panel:



Once the lasercut ply bits are on, you add some scrap balsa filler at the top, middle and bottom:



The filler needs to be shaved down slightly:



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[tommy321]

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To make room for the doubled up window frame:



Once the outter panels are done, you end up with a nice light and strong built-up door:



The manual suggests using a couple of hinge-points to mount the door, but I decided to make some custom, somewhat scale door hinges instead.

The Decathlon/Citabria, etc, all have a fairly distinct door hinge system. Basically there's a pin on the outside in the breeze that can be pulled out of the hinges with a lever inside the cockpit. Basically, in an emergency, you pull this lever and the door falls off, and you can get out in a hurry.

Here's a shot of the real door:


I picked up some brass strip, and brass tube from the LHS. Some work with tinsnips, and we have this:



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[tommy321]

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I bent the end of the strap slightly to the radius of the brass tube to give it a little more surface area to bite onto. Then I scuffed up the solder areas with sandpaper.



Then soldered a length of tube ont othe end of each strip:



I still need to clean off the residual flux, but that should be quick with the dremel and polishing tip.

A little more brass strapping to make the other hinge part, and we have a set of "somewhat-scale" door hinges.






During final assembly I'll bend up a curved hinge pin like the full scale.

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[tommy321]

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I also got a bunch done on fitting the cowling.

You start by building 8 cowling mounting brackets:





These get screwed into pre-drilled holes in the firewall.

Next we join the cowling halves:

Start by re-inforcing the inside of the cowling with a hardwood strip.



Followed by marking hole locations and drilling. I like to thread a screw into the holes as I got to ensure that they all line up:



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[tommy321]

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Here's the view from the inside. Right after this I installed 4-40 blind nuts into the wood on the inside:



I left the camera unattended, and the wife snapped a picture of me at work. You can see the GoPro taking the timelapse shots in the top right of this picture:



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[tommy321]

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Finally, here's a quick test fit of the cowling on the fuse.




And here's the timelapse for this week:

+ YouTube Video

Cheers,

Tom

[Trumpetman]

Excellent thread! Nice work on the doors as well. I've always thought that the full scale door hinge was weird but now I know why it was done that way!

[tommy321]

Update on the Decathlon!

Most of my futzing around time this week was spent getting the cowling to fit. I didn't take too many pictures of this process, but there's alot of it in the timelapse video.

I also glued in the cardboard tubes for the stab and the wing this week.

First I double checked that I still had a straight fuselage. Everything lined up with no adjustment:





I also got the motor hung. Up till now the motor was only mounted with small wood screws (so I could do the final adjustment now). I strapped the plane to the banister while aligning in the motor with the cowling to mark the holes.




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[tommy321]

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A few shots of the DA-100 in the cowling. (still needs standoffs).





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