Nosecone

Kit Building: Removable Nosecone

Kris Falk dropped by one day and did this excellent work on the nosecone of C-ILHC. This provides a great surface for fabric attachment and allows the nose cone to come off with a few screws. If you do this right, you'll have some nice ledges for attaching things like radios later on!

You will need:

- a piece of the W5X Gusset Material (like that used on your wing tips)
- 8-32 Rivnuts (from Aircraft Spruce, Goulet, You can even find them on eBay at Homepro!)
- 8-32 Stainless or AN quality machine screws and Fisheye washers.
- A few 1/8 Stainless Rivets to nip and tuck the W5X material around the fuselage

These are Rivnuts. As you will see in the following photos, my plane has 3 Rivnuts up each side and 3-4 across the bottom.

Rivnuts compress when installed and become a bolt that a machine screw will thread into.

Here's the work from the left side...

The Rivnuts are the dull items in the photos that only look like rivets - When placed on the airplane, the Nosecone has matching holes and an 8-32 screw goes through the nosecone and into the Rivnut. The shiny rivets are rivets!

And from the right

The Fine Print - Caution

Ideas, illustrations and photos are the author's own work and are for information only.
Builders of Challengers should always follow the Quad City manual.