Good Day! Today I’m working on cutting out the T-411 fuel tank access panel covers and the T-407 reinforcement rings. In my last post I laid out 14 of the access panel covers and 12 of the rings on some spare sheets of 2024-T3 0.063-inch aluminum I had.
I started by cutting the T-407 reinforcement rings on the drill press with a fly cutter. This worked surprisingly well. I’m not a huge fan of the fly cutter but today the airplane building gods were smiling down on me and I progressed smoothly.
To cut the rings out, you need to start with cutting out the outer part of the ring. Then doing a second cut to cut out the inner part.
The fly cutter definitely makes lots of shavings!
Once I had all the rings cut out, then I adjusted the fly cutter to cut out the inner portion.
The finished rings are looking really good!
Here we are with the finished pile of T-407 reinforcement rings! Like I mentioned before, this process went really smoothly and really didn’t take as long as I was expecting it to.
Next up I started to cut out the T-411 cover plates. I cut out the aluminum parcels that I previously laid out. Then worked on cutting off as much as I could with the foot shear to get the edges as close to the line to minimize trimming. As shown below was about as good as I could do. The rest I’ll clean up on the belt sander and 3M scotchbrite wheel. I kept the flat edge to of the Van’s T-411 part. I could have gone totally round, however this actually worked out better to be able to fit all my panels on the size of aluminum sheet that I had sitting around. It’s not like anyone will ever see it when the tank is mounted on the plane anyway.
Here my completed pile of rough cut T-411 panel cover plates.
Well, that’s all I have for today. Remember to please comment. I love to hear from my readers. Thanks again for coming along for this ride, you make my work worthwhile.
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