09/12/2012 - Roll bar construction part 1

I decided after a little research to follow Mike's methodology of construction

So I went out and purchased the necessary wood to make the jig and spacer blocks.  I also had enough time to cut the lightening holes in the two rear frame parts.  You can see from the picture that the tooling hole gets in the way a little of the fly cutter, so make sure everything is securely clamped.  Some builders just offset the hole, but I gave it a go with secure clamping and they turned out just fine.

Next up is the cutting of the jig and positioning the two rear parts of the frame onto the board.

Now we had measured the fuselage but the fuselage width was 42 3/8ths wide, so taking off the 3/16 x 2 for the F631C brackets, I was left with a roll bar that would be exactly 42" wide some 5/32 shorter in width than the plans !

I emailed Vans and they said 5/32ths was not much and some variation at this stage is normal.  Ok but I was still unhappy as you can imagine given everybody was reporting a variation of +/- 1/256th (may be exaggerating here) so I could not understand 5/32" short/narrow.

But as the good book says measure, read up and measure some more.  Measuring again and in the right place showed in fact I am within a gnats hair of the width called out in the plans.