I've been quite busy with another little project the last few days. My wife does IPO training with our dog and she's been asking me for a while now to make a "dog barrier" for her car so she can leave the back door of her car open while she's waiting to go on the field with the dog. Till now we've had an ugly bench in the car to for this purpose but it seems the others at her club have all made themselves a barrier of some sort. Most seem to be made out of steel welded together, I can't weld but I can work with aluminium and rivets so gues what I did, here's a picture :-).
Anyway, back to the Sonex, tonight I drilled the titanium gear legs to 1/8", I first had to make a construction with a set of vee blocks which allowed me to drill the holes in the rods perfectly centered. I also supported the base plate of my drill press with some timber blocks, my drill press is a cheap one and I've noticed before that plate will bend slightly when you put a lot of pressure on it, the timber blocks made sure this could not happen. Drilling titanium is hard, takes lots of cutting fluid and you need to stop every 10 seconds or so to clean out the burrs and allow the drill bit to stay cool. Once I had the whole thing set up, it took me about 20 minutes to drill each leg. I now still have to updrill the holes to 3/16" and finally to 1/4".
