Distraction Continued - Enclosure

Not much to go. I wanted some hinges that let me lift the front panel up and almost vertical to get it out of the way. I may design a lock at some stage that will hold the door up there.

Not many progress shots of this, but this is it all screwed in. Not very pretty, but it'll do the job really nicely.

I had to recess the hinges a little more as the bottom of the door was scraping the bench a little. No biggie.

That's better!

Finished!! Do you know what's going inside?

The Original Prusa i3 Mk2S 3D Printer from Prusa Research

I'll need to figure out a mounting system for the filament, but this puppy will 3D print anything I need which is going to be extremely handy.

(Plus, It's another gadget)

Slight Distraction - Enclosure Construction

I'm not really sure what triggered it, but one day I decided to take a break from the plane and do something totally different and make an enclosure.

Maybe it was raining which limited my ability to prime parts, or maybe it was a YouTube clip I was watching that triggered some subliminal signal. Whatever it was, I found myself calculating/researching the inside dimensions of this thing I needed to build.

See if you can guess what it is without skipping down the page.

The main reason for the enclosure was to keep any dust away from moving parts as much as possible.

I've decided this is where I'd like to put it. The reasons being:

1. Mostly out of the way;
2. Some power points located here;
3. This is where I've mounted the laptop screen that allows me to view the latest Vans plans to avoid building with out-dated instructions;
4. This area has no tools on the wall that need to be relocated.

I will need to move the vice and this area seems a little neglected anyway.
Time for a spruce up!

I needed four panels. These are the two sides and the front. All panels are made from 10mm MDF with the centre cut out. For these three, I also routed the inside edge to enable me to insert perspex panels cut to size to ensure what was going on inside this enclosure was what I intended.

This is the exciting top panel...

More tomorrow.

Time for a back-riveting plate

Over the previous couple of years I've randomly dropped into metal fab factories in the hope they'd have some small piece of steel I could use as a back-riveting plate. For whatever reason, that approach hasn't been very successful. I therefore decided to visit a steel fab/engineering workshop to request a piece be cut to size.

It cost me $60, but I've got what I want...

Again, I only realised after the fact that I didn't take any progress photos.

I've supported the backing plate underneath by four steel straps (one across each corner) which made the underside flush and the top-side not. You can sort of just see in the below image that the plate sits proud of the workbench by about 5mm. Flush would've been better but it was easier to do it the way I'll show...

I found some left-over carpet squares from some place you'll never guess. They turned out to be approx 7mm which then made the back-riveting plate sit lower by 2mm. This was a great result as I can now slide aluminium sheets around and not have them be scratched by the steel plate.

One final finishing touch I haven't yet completed is to draw lines on the carpet squares highlighting the boundaries of the plate. I learnt an expensive lesson when back-riveting one of the rudder skins so I would highly advise adding these lines when installing a back-riveting plate.

Workshop

 Well....the idea was obtain a place to build parts of a plane - check. 

Then, to setup a workshop capable of performing such a function - ahh, not quite.

This will eventually become the space I need it to be. I know, it doesn't look like it right? But it does have a little potential. It's not quite a hangar but it's the best I can do for now. If I had a choice, polished floor boards wouldn't be the base for my workshop. More on that later.

I was fortunate to be able to obtain some racking at a very discounted price - right place, right time. 

As mentioned earlier, polished floor boards wasn't my preference so I decided to cover the floor in rubber backed carpet squares. It came up better than I thought. This is obviously the 'before' shot...

I needed to get some of the racking out of the garage so I could bring my car in.

The bench was about 1.5' less than the width of the room which was perfect as the compressor fits nicely in the corner. The lighting isn't perfect (especially that one in the corner) so that's something I'll need to fix over time. 

This area will adapt as I create a place to store tools & parts, read drawings, improve lighting and the most important thing - I'll have to set up a sound system of course. I'm fortunate to have an A/C unit to one end of the room so temp shouldn't ever be an issue. Once the larger components of the plane begin, I plan on having storage space closer to the roof and may need to shuffle things around to optimize the space although I'm expecting that to be at least a couple of years down the track.