17 Oct 06 - ELT Mounting, Painting the Frame

I've been pondering ELT mounting locations (and techniques) for quite awhile now, and hadn't really come up with a great way to do it until Van's came out with a nifty little kit that was designed to do this. Moral of the story: if you procrastinate long enough, someone else will figure out a way to do it and show you how.

Okay, so maybe that's not a very good moral. But it worked pretty well in this case. About the only oddity is that I mounted it higher - on a higher set of longerons - than they said to. The reason for this is that the lower ones attach where the fuselage skin curves in more, and I could not figure out a way to get a drill (even a right angle drill) or a rivet puller in there. Not good. In addition, the higher longeron that we ended up using is made of much thicker stock than the lower ones, so in theory it may be a bit stronger, too.

Here's step one - this part is match drilled to the longerons.	Prime it, rivet the nutplates on there, and pull the rivets. You're done.
Here are the plans for this subkit - the plans show it attached on the left side of the fuselage. This one is on the right, but you have to buy the kit for either a left or right one. You can also see how - according to the plans - it is attached lower in the fuselage than where we put it.	Got a top coat on this guy. Looks okay - there are some thin spots, so this will probably get painted again. That's what I get for trying to paint while we're losing light outside. Bummer.

Depending on what nutplates you use for this little mounting bracket, you can use it to mount an ELT or the power supply for the strobes. Clever!

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