7 May 06 - Altrack, Mid-Fuselage Riveting

Probably the most exciting news from today is that the altitude hold is wired, and has been powered on and seems to be working fine! Details below:

The button has been soldered directly to the wiring harness in there. (This is before shrink wrapping it.) If you do this, be sure to get everything on (back of the button, heat shrink, etc., on there before you start soldering!)	Button is powered on - after it goes through its bootup cycle, the servo in the back of the fuselage starts making noises. Seems to be working, but I'm not sure there's a way to test this until you're flying it.
This was the scene of what was a pretty big error that we managed to do much earlier in the project. What you're looking at here is something that should have been riveted before the rollbar was attached to the plane, but wasn't. Because of this, some of these rivets were hard to get to, and some of them - well, I'm still not sure what we're going to do here. We were able to get about half of them in, and the rest are going to need to be pulled, or we may drill them out so they're a bit bigger and put a nut/bolt through that hole. This seems like something you wouldn't want coming loose, so just leaving half the rivets out without something to fix this is just not going to work, to understate it. In any case, when you do this part, do better than we did about making sure something you install isn't going to cause problems later down the road. This should all be bucked before you start putting the rollbar on, it seems to me.
The three aft-most rivets had to be put in here.	These are the problematic ones - you can see a few holes to the left and top where we don't have anything, we're still contemplating these.
And now, for something completely different:
This has been painted, which was an interesting enough process that we'll discuss it below:

This is (obviously) the fuel selector plate that has recently been engraved by Bill Esther, who did a fantastic job, by the way. Although it shows up just fine in one color, we realized that it would sure make it even easier to read if the letters were painted. How do do this, though? I'll spare you the descriptions of the process that we went through to get to this result, but here's what we ended up doing, and we're pleased with the results:

• First, just prime and paint it normally, with whatever interior color you have. For us, this was with just rattle can paints (Valspar Satin Taupe, actually). Because this is an aerosol, should you need to clean up the next layer of paint, there's not much you can do it with that won't mess up this layer.
• Then, fill in the letters using black tempra paint. This is water-soluble, so after letting it dry for just a bit, wash the paint out that you got all over the outside where you don't want it. Because the paint that you want to keep is sitting below the surface, it's easy to not scrape it off, too.
• Now you've got black in your letters, but if it gets wet, it'll run, which is clearly not ideal. Now give it a few coats of clearcoat (we just used the aerosol stuff for this, too), and now you've got everything protected.

And mom, thanks for helping with the filling-in-the-letters part. I couldn't have done that as well as you did.

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