We've been pretty busy putting things back into the plane now that it is upholstered. I didn't quite understand that if you follow the manual you apply the upholstery at 3 or 4 different times, so there's been a bit of work with the carpet knife cutting holes through the lovely grey furry headlining fabric that lines our plane. You would not believe how difficult it is to drill a hole through that material - it manages to wrap itself around the drill tip then nothing happens. Anyway the first thing I did was bolt in the brake master cylinder, put in all the brake lines and then with Gary's help prime the brakes with brake fluid, which was fun! Then I bolted in the cable mounts that Julian had already drilled: the position of the cable mount affects the smoothness of the flight controls, and as a non-pilot I don't think I can get it right. I also had heaps of fun bolting cables onto the moving bits (that is the technical description). Whilst Julian got all the good work: 4 days with his head in the footwell, fiddling around trying to get the rudder pedals to move smoothly and as far as they need to go (the rudder pedals are like the steering wheel and we had a lot of time at which we could steer as far as we wanted to the left, but only go straight ahead to the right....)
In terms of minor disasters: I managed to drop a socket into the console (the hole I was working from was 1.5 fingers wide and 3 deep, but the bottom of the console a whole hand deep...) and then a bolt as well. As it turned out the socket was easy to get out using a special magnet on a pointer tool, but the bolt had disappeared completely: I think it slid down some cables, luckily Julian managed to grab it with the magnet on the fibreglass bottom of the plane and work it out to a little 1 inch diameter hole right below where I dropped it & out through there.
Ok here's another add in photo, Julian doing some engine wiring:
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