Hello Everyone. I’ve made major step forward on the build, I’ve married the cockpit unit to the frame, and it was far from easy. First I needed to make more cockpit components. Radios, oxygen control unit throttles and fix them to the inner sides of the frames before continuing. There are several mounting points, three tabs into the front firewall, one in the floor, two lugs protruding from the cast parts which fit into slots in the frame, and the floor and angled seat back also need to be exactly in line with their adjacent parts of the frame and glued into place. Needless to say that it didn’t fit, most did but the moulded lug on the upper cowling was about 1mm too low, no amount of force would get it to slot in at the same time as the rest of the attachment points. This had come about because when I’d attached the upper cowling to the instrument cluster being no click type accurate joint, there had been a slight amount of rocking type play and I had fixed it about 1 degree from level thus the slight misalignment. I really had no choice but to disassemble the cowling and mount the lower part of the cockpit separately. When set I then attach the cowling lug to the frame and then whilst the whole thing was in the right place glue everything back together. Once I’d decided to do it this way it was fairly straight forward and no alignment issues arose. Knowing this I would when originally fixing the cowling to the instrument unit used contact glue which would have had enough give to get the fixing points into place, hindsight!
The only issue that I was left with as will imagine was the need to re paint quite a few areas of the cockpit, but having done that it’s all good and I’m back on track.
I've circled the offending tab.
