Started November 13, 2006
I took a week of vacation and spent about 10 hours per day for the past 6 days going through the covering process of my Bearhawk. I had the help and guidance (as well as the use of his shop) from my mentor and tech counselor Mickey Whitenburg. The following pages will document what we accomplished in 6 days.
Preparations for covering the fuselage included installing the fuel system and running all of the wiring for the fuselage.
Once that was done, the fuselage was moved to Mickey's shop where there is a lot more room and the annoying fumes can go out into the atmosphere instead of into my house.
I will be using the Poly-Fiber system throughout, for all of the fabric covering and painting. The details on fabric covering were shown previously in the wing section of this website (see covering the flaps and ailerons) so I won't repeat it all here, but the process is the same. Cut to fit, glue it to the structure, heat shrink it, poly brush, rib stitch as needed, tape and poly spray.
The first thing to be covered was the interior. This has to be thought out some because you can easily paint yourself into a corner if you are not careful. Study the October 1999 Bear-Tracks carefully to get an idea of how everything goes.
We started with the forward area of the cabin sides:
As you can see above, the fabric stops just short of the rudder pedals. This is needed to allow some clearance for the rudder cable attach points. To accomplish this, I installed a piece of 3/4" aluminum angle with some adel clamps. The fabric wraps around the angle.
Next, the left, aft side of the cabin was covered:
Note that the rear window is a bit different than that shown in the plans. You can click here to see how it was fabricated then hit the "back" button on your browser to return to this page. The window channel piece was removed and the fabric was wrapped and glued around the outer window frame. The channel was then clecoed back in place.
Note that all of the side pieces of fabric were installed before the headliner. The side pieces were wrapped around the top longeron as shown in the Bear-tracks Newsletter.
Here is the area below the cargo door:
With the cabin sides all covered, the headliner was covered next with the
fabric overlapping the side fabric on the top longerons.
Note the forward end is tucked into the windshield channel. I'll show how that was done momentarily.
Here is the completed interior.
In the above picture, you can see the aluminum angle clamped in place near
the front of the cabin. This gives you a pace to terminate the fabric
just before it reaches the rudder pedals.
Looking back, I would say the interior was the biggest challenge of the entire covering process. There are a lot of little tubes, tabs, fairleads and pulleys to get around and its quite time consuming. The payoff is a very light but durable interior.
The exterior was done next. There are couple of ways to tackle the exterior. You will need to make a sewn seam either way you go about it. Where you put the seam is up to you. If you want a nice smooth appearance where the vertical fin meets the fuselage, run the seam(s) up the top fuselage stringer. If you have the cargo door option, you can just run one seam up the left top fuselage stringer. If you don't have the cargo door option, you will need 2 seams, one on each top stringer. You will see why in a minute.
I elected to run the seam up the left, top fuselage stringer. To start
with, we unrolled the fabric along the left side of the fuselage, letting
about 3 inches hang down below the bottom longeron. It was then loosely clamped
in place and rough cut around the left side of the vertical fin:
The fabric was then rough cut about 3" hanging over the left, top stringer:
The fabric was then cut off the roll about 5" in front of the windshield channel at the top of the fuselage.
Using a pencil. a line was drawn on the fabric right down the center of the top, left stringer. This line represents where the seam should be sewn. The same will be done for the right side fabric as well and the 2 pencil lines will be mated together to form the seam.
Click here to go to Fabric Covering page 2