Brief Description: Drill F-714 turtle deck to fuselage.
Getting the fuselage level was quite a task for me. I supported the fuselage with 2 saw horses. 1 under the main wing spar and the other just aft under the rear wing spar. The really cool thing about these saw horses from Lowe’s is that you can make very fine adjustments in height by simply adjusting the width of the 2 legs. This can be done independently for each side. Adjusting the height this way you don’t have to use shims.
I took my time and messed around with both a bubble level and a digital level at 4 locations, the fire wall, main wing spar, aft wing spar and longerons. We’ll mess with the aft deck later. First get the forward end level.
Here is my take on the digital level. “piece of shit”. Hey, it’s my log and I can swear if I want to. I think the digital level is good for angle finding but not for leveling.
For me the bubble level provided a very accurate and precise leveler. I got the forward end perfectly level. I had to use a mirror on a telescoping antenna to see the bubble.
Now for the aft deck. The digital level shows that it was 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 degrees off. See what I mean. The digital level is a piece of shit for leveling. I used a bungee cord attached to the Hor Stab Attach Bar and a heavy vice sitting on the work bench. It didn’t take much force to level it. The weight of the bungee cord was almost enough.
Image 3 shows the bubble. You can see it does not look perfectly level but it actually is. To view the bubble you have to view the bubble perpendicular to the center of the bubble location. The camera is slightly shifted to the left causing the bubble to not look level, but it is.
