Here are some pictures of our 4 place Bearhawk build we are working on. An Avipro quickbuild kit.


O540 baffling kit

Here are some more:








Panels ready now, this is an earlier pic


Tail strobe, and a couple shots of the color "Piper trainer blue"





Geeze, we must be crazy! But I see light at the end of this tunnel!

Lookin good! Great to see another BH build here.

Nice. I like your paint booth.

I like the wood door sills, they look durable but classy.

Thanks guys,

Yes, the wood door sills were kind of a love-hate relationship The reason behind them, is we cut the factory doors, shortened them and welded them into one piece. We wanted them to be "gull wing" style seaplane doors opening up, and they needed to be about 2-3" shorter than stock to clear the strut without any (our opinion) ugly "mouse trap" type accommodation. Not for looks.

Used gas struts to open both pilot and copilot doors. Doors are completely covered in lexan, and if you look carefully we incorporated a full lexan skylight above the pilot/copilot.

Unfortunately no online Kitlog, only paper records/pictures (building with my father, who is an "oldschool" 60 yo A&P IA)

Fabric is Dacron and we are utilizing the polyfiber system with polyurethane paint. (hopefully I have that all correct, Im learning)

Should have the fuselage completely covered this week, then its on to doping/sanding/painting....
Already have the control surfaces completely done, I was inventorying the fasteners for motor assembly this past week and inevitably you end up ordering a dash +/- from what you have in parts, ha Aircraft Spruce has been on speed-dial for years now.

Interior fabric is going to be covered in polytone for ease of repair and cost.

Ha, yes the paint booth was quite a project in itself... I complained and wondered at the time why we were spending so much effort on it, but I see why now dad was so adamant about it. It difficult to tell from the pictures, but the Piper trainer blue and the Grey which you see on the instrument panel are both metallic "metal flake" colors, and they can be VERY difficult to shoot correctly (read: evenly). So Ive found that having spent a lot of time getting the paint booth (ample light), rotisserie, guns, etc just right pays off in the end.

The control surfaces and leading edges of wings are Piper Trainer Blue, rest of wings are an off-white, fuselage is off-white with the grey and Trainer blue as accent stripes similar to this:

Ok more progress, fuselage is coming together nicely....














Cant wait to fly this thing!

You'll be amazed and be grinning from ear to ear! Keep it light. Add some VG's, and an EZFlap, and elevator gap seals to start with. Then once you get used to it, add bushwheels and a T3 tailwheel suspension for land op's anyway. Where you are, I imagine it will live mostly on floats and ski's, though.

Been making some real progress the past week,

Fuselage Doped


Figured I show some pics of the control surfaces, etc. - I am REALLY happy with how the metal flake turned out, looks like candy!





Newer pic of the panel, ready to rock.

And here is the oil cooler firewall plenum I put together, we thought this method was superior to hanging in on the motor mount with adel clamps... etc...



Should be enough cooling, ya think!?

Yes, that is a good way to do it. It is how Kevin installed his and it has worked well for him. He used the Vans RV10 oil cooler kit. We both used the RV 540 baffle kit which complements this install method.

Yeah, we looked at different ways to mount the cooler... it seemed the most sturdy/clean way to install it. This is also a Vans cooler plenum mount kit, cooler when filled with oil has got to be a heavy item up there vibrating!

Spent 4 days marking, ironing, polybrushing finish tapes!

Wow, been learning a lot about the PolyBrush system... working well but my first go at this wasn't perfect! Did my best though, the talent and patience involved in doing a showplane quality fabric job for those that have it, is impressive!



By the way, that access for the horizontal stabs is *JUST* big enough, glad we made the large access in the lower tail section!

The PolySpray is ON! Final color is next




Gullwing doors with Lexan getting ready to install....

Wow.

Beautiful.

Can I ask how many hours you and your A&P IA father have in the quick-build kit so far?

How many hours would you say your build time will end up totaling ( roughly ).

Ha, as funny as it sounds I would have to guess! Probably 3000-4000 hrs at least.

I would say that the 2000hr quickbuild guideline is "optimistic", I've seen some online reports finishing in 1.5 years and my hats off to them! That's a lot of work in a short timeframe. I appprehensively checked my log start date recently, and I started cutting out aluminum floorboards in Aug 2008! ha We must be the slowest builders around!

I assume that having a spouse that is interested in assisting build is a HUGE asset in homebuilding, unfortunately that isn't the case with myself or my father. We have to make progress, but can't end up divorced over the deal as that would be a huge step backwards financially if not an end entirely to the project.

I'm of course including all the research time and parts searching/ordering in our hours. One thing that has been a lesson in patience for me, is waiting for the EXACT proper bolts from Aircraft Spruce to arrive in the mail.... much of the time we have a +/- bolt in spare stock and serves fine for mockup but for final assembly - having to wait. To try and keep costs down we try to group parts orders together, and this adds somewhat to the times... we in Alaska don't get free next day delivery... its more like a week in some cases.

When I started I didn't have 2 children, and I purchased/sold another plane and earned my PPL in there too.... so life happens regardless.

I can tell you that you are not the slowest builder around I got a QB kit 12/06... My problem was buying, maintaining and upgrading flying planes. I had 4.5' of flood water in my hangar last month take care of the flyers for me.
So I am trying to hold off on the pull of a sweet Pa-18 or 180/185 and get a great jump on the BH. Keep up the nice work.
John

Well, I can say recently we have made some awesome progress on the old airplane build!

Paint complete, Juneau White (still have to paint the stripes down the side, but we are going to do that when we have the engine on and cowling complete.)


The name of the game recently was initial prep (removing paint masking on all areas, installing some of the floorboards, and complete wiring terminations)
You can get a good look at how the doors worked out, they took some time to get to latch smoothly!






ITS ALIVE!!!


I used an old Ham radio 12vdc power supply to power the electrical system for checkout.


Back of the ICOM radio connector

Bearhawk_Cub wrote:I can tell you that you are not the slowest builder around I got a QB kit 12/06... My problem was buying, maintaining and upgrading flying planes. I had 4.5' of flood water in my hangar last month take care of the flyers for me.
So I am trying to hold off on the pull of a sweet Pa-18 or 180/185 and get a great jump on the BH. Keep up the nice work.
John

Dad and I were laughing after spending 2 hours getting the baggage doors to open/shut securely and smoothly, that we really are crazy for building and that most people will never know why it takes so long to complete something like an airplane part time. ha

Very sorry to hear about the flood damage