The last post talked about dimpling, bending the sheet metal to fit a countersunk rivet. Its larger sibling is countersinking, which is used when the metal is too thick to allow dimpling. Countersinking is done with a countersinking tool, basically a drill with the correct angle and a pilot that holds it in the correct …
Some of the rivets used to assemble the Sling are counter-sunk, that is, they have a flat head that is flush with the skin of the aircraft. This has the advantage of giving the aircraft a more smooth appearance and also improving the air flow over the surface. Having a smooth surface is most important …
Once it became clear that building was going to take place in Sweden, I had to start educating myself on the difference between homebuilding an aircraft in Sweden vs. in the U.S. The legal requirements in the U.S are amazingly minimal. As long as at least 51% of the tasks have been completed by people …
Our new house has a very nice garage that measures 8.4m deep by 7.4m wide internally. This equates to a two-car garage with extra depth, not a ton of space. But because it was built to house machinery, it has 3.7m high ceilings and garage ports going up to that full height. As such, there’s …
It’s now 12 years since I first posted about airplane building and announced that I was going to build a Long-Ez. Since then, our life situation has changed considerably, we’ve moved across the world, received kids, changed jobs, and no plane building whatsoever has taken place… Once we had one kid and were thinking about …
It’s been a while since the last update on the filament storage project. I was at the point that I needed to machine the brackets that will hold the filament spools when I started the spindle bearing replacement project. Since it took a while to get the spindle reliably working again, and there are 5 …
The previous post ended with test running the upgraded spindle bearings. This testing dragged on a bit because I found the bearings loosened up. I would run up the spindle to temperature, take a few cuts, and it would start making a horrible racket. Upon inspection, it turned out there was free play in the …
In the previous spindle post, I talked about replacing the bearings, how I was not very happy with how that had worked out, and how I had ordered angular contact bearings to replace the deep groove ball bearings. Now it was time to do it. While searching the web for writings about these spindle bearings, …
While I took the Z-axis apart to replace the spindle on the CNC mill, I made another discovery. I already mentioned in that post how the thrust bearings for the Z-axis ballscrew were shot, but another thing that puzzled me since the day I got the CNC conversion kit was that it appeared that the …
The last time the CNC mill got some love was when the steppers were replaced with servos. This was quite a while ago, and the mill hasn’t seen very much use since. However, it was now time to machine the holders for the filament rolls for the storage box so I got started squaring the …