Top of the Tail Cone

I had all five pieces of tail cone for my Bede BD-4C cut out but I had not been able to drill the screw holes in the top. The TC-2 (top piece) fits over the skins. That would have been just fine except the skins came pre-fabricated from BedeCorp, including having the screw holes pre-drilled. I did not have any way to drill holes in the TC-2 when my holes had to exactly match the pre-drilled holes in the underlying, hidden skin.

Fortunately, there is a tool for that: a strap duplicator. It has a pin which fits in the (hidden) hole and a bushing that you stick your drill bit into. The bushing stays aligned with the pin so the new hole that you drill is perfectly aligned with the existing hole. If you look at the picture to the right, it worked like this: The skin, with the pre-drilled hole was on the far right. The right-hand strap of the duplicator, with its pin (not really visible in the photograph) sat on the left side of the skin with the pin in the pre-drilled hole. The piece the I needed to drill, the TC-2, went between the two straps. Then the drill bit was inserted into the bushing in the left-hand strap.

The duplicator did its job and here is the result. The TC-2 tail cone neatly fits on top of the pre-fab skins.

I wrote previously about the building the tail cone and posted more pictures in my tail cone photo gallery.