{"id":13316,"date":"2018-02-23T19:39:10","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T19:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=13316"},"modified":"2018-02-23T22:55:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T22:55:37","slug":"weedhopper-nearly-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/weedhopper-nearly-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Weedhopper nearly there"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wim and I went back to Malbec this afternoon to see if we could at last get the Weedhopper completely assembled. In the event, we didn’t quite succeed but we did get the main part of the job done, namely attaching the wings and struts to the fuselage.<\/p>\n

The last time we did the job way back in October 2106 we had a heck of a job getting the main pins in that secure the wings to the fuselage and finally gave up as they would have had to come off again anyway when the aircraft was moved to the field down the road from my house to fly it over to Malbec. In fact, because I mislaid the starter key, we ended up moving it by road so today was the first time since then that we’d attempted to fit the wings a second time.<\/p>\n

In the meantime I’d taken the trouble to RTFM (read the manual) and found that the battens that give the wing its aerodynamic profile should not be fitted until after the wings have been attached and surmised that that was where our problem lay. And I was correct, because today, especially after Wim had tapered the tips of the main pins, attaching the wings went like clockwork.<\/p>\n

After we’d got the wings and struts on we went around and fitted all of the safety rings that prevent the pins that secure the structure from dropping out. All went well until we got to the rear main wing pins but we solved the accessibility problem by removing the pins and inserting them from back to front. I can’t remember if that’s how they were fitted originally but in any case, there’s no chance that they can fall out given that they have safety rings fitted to secure them.<\/p>\n

We had one slight setback. I learnt at my cost from fitting MYRO’s wing battens that you have to be very careful inserting them into the wing because its easy, especially on an older aircraft, to tear a hole in the batten pockets that hold the battens inside the wing. And sure enough, despite taking the utmost care, the very last batten in the tip of the right wing did just that.<\/p>\n

Fortunately the damage is not too severe and I think that with patience it will be possible to insert a length of wood into the interior of the wing through the wing tip to support the tip of the batten and bridge it across the tear into the next section of undamaged pocket. In any case, that’s what Wim and I will be trying to do over the week end and I’m sure that we’ll succeed.<\/p>\n

But no matter, after the problems we had last time, today we were pleased to get the wings fully assembled and fitted, albeit with the ailerons still to go on, and they won’t take long to do. The last job we did this afternoon before calling it a day was to fit the tensioning straps between the wings. They’ll need to be pulled much tighter before the ailerons are attached so fitting them and leaving them in slight tension was a good idea as the wing skins have not been tensioned for so long.<\/p>\n

To finish off, here are some shots showing the Weedhopper with its wings on in the barn with the X-Air. Just as we thought, there is plenty of room for them both and we think that we’ll be able to make even more space by turning the X-Air a little bit.<\/p>\n

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Hopefully, bar a good clean, the Weedhopper will be all ready to fly as of Sunday afternoon. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be, anyway \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wim and I went back to Malbec this afternoon to see if we could at last get the Weedhopper completely assembled. In the event, we didn’t quite succeed but we did get the main part of the job done, namely attaching the wings and struts to the fuselage. The last time we did the job … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13316"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13330,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13316\/revisions\/13330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}