20 May 08

Hunt and I made a shim this morning, and Ben and I glued the truss on immediately thereafter. This was a huge step for the chassis, which is steadily nearing completion. Luke cleaned up the heddles that he glued yesterday, and then he and I glued in the trim rings onto the access doors for the box channel caps. A big challenge that we wrestled with was how to locate them precisely during the glue-up. I couldn't glue them on while they were in the holes in the box channel, because we would inadvertently glue them to the box channel. Using tape to mask the box channel off was not an option due to the tightness of the fit of the trim rings. Drilling holes for rivets was an option that we considered, but we didn't want any holes in the trim rings if we could help it. We ended up mounting the doors in the box channel for proper location, spreading PVA glue onto the rings and putting a small dot of hot melt glue in the corner of each ring. We then stuck the ring onto the door for a few seconds and removed the door from the box channel. Last, we put each door in the vacuum bag and let the PVA cure. The hot melt was easily strong enough to hold the rings in place until the PVA took over. Luke, Hunt and I went to Curvemakers for lunch and picked up some cylindrical, fluted posts to use as a roll-up device on the loom. Ben and Zac cleaned in and around the glue room for most of the day. After lunch, Luke and I glued the trim rings into the engine cover access doors using the same method described above. Kendal showed up, and scraped some glue and wrapped and cut some string for the loom. Hunt took the valves out of the cylinder heads using the drill press, and Zac and Bob worked on organizing all of our engine parts. Luke made some brackets that will hold the roll-up cylinders on the loom while I worked on fitting the engine covers for about the 73rd time. Each time I fit those is more fun than the next. If I build another one of these, I won't touch the engine covers until the truss is actually glued on. Everyone broke for dinner, and I came back out afterwards and got the 2nd engine cover pretty well fitted. Tomorrow, we work on getting the chassis on the rotisserie.