Experimenter is a magazine created by EAA for people who build airplanes. We will report on amateur-built aircraft as well as ultralights and other light aircraft.
Issue link: http://experimenter.epubxp.com/i/101874
T h e S e c o n d T im e A r o un d… knew that if I wanted to fly it, I had to finish it first. And because I'm no 30-year-old, that meant bearing down on it. "The first week after the kit arrived was like Christmas. But this time I had to run a careful inventory and check every part against the current inventory list; because being an older kit, some stuff hadn't been updated, and I didn't want to build out-of-date parts into my airplane." Because this was going to be his ultimate traveling machine, Andy wanted to get the project jump-started and once again relied on the factory for that initial push. Landing gear retract system in the lower side of the wing. "I took the kit to the Lancair build shop and spent another intense week there. It was 10 hours a day working on the kit with the build center guys looking over my shoulder. We closed out the wing, built the tail, and fit the center section to the fuselage. At the end of the week, I had something that looked like an airplane rather than piles of miscellaneous pieces. What I trailered home was like the empty husk of a cicada: It had the form but absolutely nothing was inside of it, which was fine with me because I wanted to do all the systems and detail work." If you were to ask Andy if he considers himself to be a perfectionist, he'll argue that he's not. He will, however, freely admit that he has a very clear picture in his mind as to how parts are supposed to fit together and what kinds of tolerances he likes to work to. Sam, Andy's wife, brushes some shavings out of the wing interior. She was hands on throughout the project . Engine mount on the frewall. 16 Vol.2 No.1 / January 2013 He said, "The first thing I did, as I started assembling the basic airframe, was to fit all the components together and start working on how well they transitioned from one to the other. It just seemed natural that there should be absolutely zero discontinuity where one component attached to another, like where the wings hit the center section or how the center section flows into the fuselage. This airplane is just one big beautiful curve and invites a builder to try to make it appear to be made of one piece by eliminating gaps, joints, and mismatches. That's not being a perfectionist; that's just recognizing how something is supposed to go together and doing it. To do anything else, when something is shaped the way the Legacy is, is sacrilege. "When you're building something like this, you develop all sorts of tricks on how to sand straight and keep gaps even and at a minimum. Fortunately, there were a lot of other guys on the airport doing similar things, so I picked up many ideas from them and developed others on my own. I learned, for instance, that one way to make a perfect 1/16inch gap was to fold sandpaper around a wide putty knife and use that as the sanding block in the gap." Right from the beginning Andy practiced the "weight is the enemy" mindset that, when trying to build a flawless