Today I was in the mood for some welding. First, I noticed back when I primed the headrests that I had missed a problem with one of them. I had started to cut one of the horizontal tubes, then realized that I was cutting in the wrong place. This left a scored line around the tube, so I wanted to grind the paint off and run a bead around that score mark to remove the potential stress riser.
Next, I needed to make a welding cart to hold my tanks. I started with this cheap harbor freight hand truck and spent an hour or so modifying it. I didn’t count this time towards Bearhawk building of course.
With the tanks safely secured, I started on that ELT bracket.
Note: I’ve since removed this bracket and found a better way to do the same job. The problem that I encountered with this installation was that the fairlead fit a little too loose in the fairlead tube, and there wasn’t much clearance for the antenna feed connection. The better method that I came up with was to use an aluminum sheet piece on top of the stringers.
I started with the tube that will hold the fairlead plastic, and a short piece of tube that will locate that tube vertically.
My goal was to try and locate the top of the antenna plate just below the level of the stringers, just in case the covering had a little bit of sag between them. The reality is that since the stringers are so close together at that point, the covering probably won’t sag at all.
Here’s the blank after I’ve bent it. It’s going to be a tight fit with a 90 degree BNC adapter to keep the coax out of the elevator trim cable’s way.
