The day started off pretty decent and went downhill from there! The story starts with leaving some steps open awaiting receipt of ordered items - in this story only the bearing sleeve retainer and alodine and alumiprep are important. The bearing sleeve retainer came in a couple of days ago and knowing that that was used to installed bearings I went ahead and installed the bearing in the control column - without checking one last time the instructions. The alumiprep and alodine came in a couple of days later and after mixing them and treating the control column mounting parts (see picture) and control sticks I moved on to the final assembly of the control column. That's when the day turned blackest. I was going thru the instructions to ensure no open steps would be missed when discovered that the order of installing the bearings in the control column was key to installing the control stick pivots. So - I spent the next two hours figuring out how a few simple modifications to the parts in question would allow the parts to still go together. Once done with that, I discovered that a bearing sleeve that goes into the bushings in the control column mount was too short and it took about an hour to CAREFULLY file down the bushing's shoulder to get all to work as designed. Done at last!!
