Isaac Shultz's Sonex Project

Over the last couple weeks I've been checking off everything left on the firewall forward installation.  I painted the inside of the cowling with an acrylic paint to protect the fiberglass from oil and engine gunk.  Here I used spot filler to fill all the little depressions. I used a old card to push it into the surface and then let it dry.  Once it was dry I sanded the surface flat. Here I glued in the eyeball vents. Here I installed my new spark plugs and routed the cables from the ignition coils to the spark plugs. I gapped the plugs according to the aerovee manual.  Here I installed the CHT probes and then reinstalled the intakes. Here I finally got to glue in the blockoff I made months ago for the fuel filler neck. I gooped it up with plenty of RTV and slid it in. After plenty of sanding and priming I finally decided it was time to stop the endless cycle of sand and prime and throw some color on.  ...

So everyone is kinda freaked out over corona lately. My gymnastics competitions have been canceled, and so have my classes. This has been great for building, I've got all week and maybe more to get some great work in.  I have been doing all the last things on the cowling before it's time to prime and paint. The final few things were adding my quarter turn southco fasteners, finishing the air exit cutout, and doing a final sand. (if you can ever even say final and sand in the same sentence) Then it's time to prime. The southco process started by going to southco's website to order an assortment of different sizes. When I completed my order the shipping cost came out to like $40, which was clearly wrong. I was ordering less than 20 studs. It would fit in a flat rate envelope easily. So I scrapped my southco order and went to Aircraft Spruce to order my cheese platter of sizes. The shipping there was much more reasonable and I combined it with some other items I n...

Over the past few work sessions I have ironed out all the little things in my electrical system that remained to be done. The big items were: the OAT sensor (outside air temperature), the ELT (emergency locator transmitter), and my comm radio and transponder antennae.  The OAT sensor had to be wired in to my computerized instrument display. It had been a while since I'd worked on electrical system stuff so I got to gauge the effectiveness of my old notes. I'd give myself a 6/10 it was workable and after some cross referencing and thinking about it I was able to reconstruct how everything had been wired but it was not as easy or clear as I thought they would be when I wrote them. I added a lot of clarification and a couple sketches to help make the next time I go poking around behind the panel a bit easier. The actual wiring job was easy enough I had to solder one side and crimp a fast on onto another wire. Then all I had to do was dive under the panel head first and route th...