After another whopping week of work, 37 hrs, clicking the ol' HOBBS up to almost 2700 hrs now! And that was done while taking a day off to celebrate Sheryl's birthday. Needless to say, I have been a busy bee. I finally brought the camera home from the hangar and downloaded the 50 pictures on it. So...without further ado, this is what I've been up to in the Factory.
To fill in some of the details of how I did my vinyl. I used Visio to create my 1:1 scale graphics. I then printed them out, again at 1:1 scale, to test fit them. It took a couple iterations to dial it in. Its tough to get it right without some trial and error, as its hard to get really precise measurements on the panel cutout locations.
Once I got it looking good, I saved the Visio file in a scalable vector graphic format. This is what Aerographics said would work well for them. After they received it, we still had to do some tweaking to get it just right. Some of the graphics details got lost in translation. But, they were great getting it all fixed up.
You've already seen the finished product, but here are a few more pics. I did plenty of research to try to determine exactly what placarding we need in our planes. Basically what I found is its not very clearly defined, but the two things you absolutely need are the passenger warning shown here and the "Experimental". Both need to be clearly visible. As you can see, I added two more that I thought were important for safe operation. From what I can tell, those are optional.
This shot gives you an idea how the panel wraps around the insert. Laying out vinyl wasn't as foolproof as I thought. Air bubbles were evident in mine. I am letting them sit awhile, and if they don't disappear I will pop them with a pin.
If you look close, you'll see that this isn't perfect, a professional would have done a better job. But...they would cost more. At some point, its just kind of nice to do things yourself and save some money. Although, its not perfect, it looks nice and I'm proud of it. You really have to learn to love the warts too when building one of these. I have yet to see a perfect RV...so do the best you can, breathe...smile and build on.
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