Finishing luggage door and designing throttle quadrant label
TLDR
- Completed luggage door installation
- Started to design throttle quadrant labeling
Detail
Luggage door
The last thing I need to do on the luggage door is attaching sealing rubber, which I bought from McMaster Carr, and make sure the locking plate closes without gap. ie, the door cannot have “play” when closed.
Adding the rubber is easy, I just glued it using 3M all weather glue.
For the lock, I decided to add a spacer plate between the door and the lock. I ordered an aluminum stock from McMaster and cut it to size.
Then I drilled two holes on the plate and door frame, countersunk/dimpled them, and put it on using two countersink 3.2mm rivets.
After the spacer plate, I adjusted the rubber seal a bit to make sure there is no kinks when it runs over the new spacer plate.
After the spacer plate is installed, the lock closes just right. There is no more space between the locking plate and the door, and there is wobbling and wiggling at all.
Since the door itself was manually bent to match the curvature of the airframe, there is some unevenness around the door. But it mostly fits the airframe, so I think I will call this part officially done.
Throttle quadrant labeling
And I started to design the label on the throttle quadrant. The plan is to use a Cricut machine to print the labels in vinyl instead of going the powder coating routing. The benefit is that it’s a very easy process, but won’t be as permanent as powder coating. I will monitor the long term effect.
I used Sticker Mule design studio to design a few simple graphics today. I have not printed them yet so not sure how well they fit. I will do that next weekend when I visit my hangar. 