12 Days to Christmas
Hello again to all our followers of the project. Very sorry for such a long delay in writing a blog. Have no fear! We are still super active and engaged in the P-36 Hawk build. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused us some issues with not meeting with all our crew. Major strain on everyone of you as well - I’m sure! We have also had some delays due to finding and moving into a facility. We needed space to assemble the prototype and a home for some very large machining equipment for ScaleBirds and Scott’s paint-ball gun company. That took way longer than we anticipated and we actually completely installed the equipment twice! The first time was in our two car garage and what a job that was! We quickly found that the electric service on our street is not living up to standards and barely good enough for residential - even though we installed a serious entrance to handle rated line amperage. The line was under-performing and old. So, either pay huge money to upgrade the street, or find a new home. We did the later and we have a tremendous new facility at the local airport industrial park. We still had to un-install, relocated, install all over again and then improve the space with bathroom and air compressor rooms. We have added benches, desks, tables, tool boxes, storage racks, electrical receptacles for work stations as well as a fridge and microwave. I need a coffee maker for Christmas (honey are you listening?). It’s a great shop and the landlord is a private pilot and giving us a super deal. Thank you Kevin Cook! We now have a commercial address - still need to get the mail setup - so we will be able to have customers stop by and not have to deal with my home basement. We will still be fabricating parts and designing from home - I have a great shop there with suddenly more space in it.
Prior to all the equipment/shop effort, we prepped and painted the whole airframe in August. We were under-the-gun so we didn’t have time to blog about it - then jumped right into the machine space prep and install. No time either as that situation turned into a serious major catastrophe and then back to a super exciting and awesome ending.
The current situation - 12 days to Christmas: The airframe is mostly at the new shop. Wings and engine are in our hanger space. We have the fuselage in a temporary stand mounted to the engine mount and resting on the tail wheel. The wings are removed. We have installed the canopy, instrument panel and tail surfaces. We have replaced the wing attachment brackets with billet machined plates. We installed the fuel tanks and closed-up the inboard wing sections. This week we are replacing the aft spar to fuselage brackets prior to installing the wing center-section by Christmas hopefully. We are also chasing a little binding issue with the rudder - we have nailed that down to the vertical stabilizers’ fwd spar attachment. We are designing a simple fix and will get that ironed out in a few days.
We will have some extra hands on deck with the Christmas to New Years week off from the day job. The plan is to have the airframe out of the fixture and standing on its gear legs with the engine re-attached. Flight controls installed again and rigged by end of the year. Early January should be wiring, pitot, fuel and brake lines. Then fairings and cowling installation. We will be making a very concerted effort to keep you all better informed and show more pics and some videos. Scott has been posting images to Instagram and Facebook. Its really getting exciting now that it has paint and is coming back together! The end is in sight - and that’s only the beginning!
