Ounces equal pounds. I know this. I’ve warned my share of builders about it. But sometimes you have to buck the clichés and do what you have to do. I’d never build a 7-pound aluminum baggage bin when a 1-pound canvas pouch will suffice, but I’ve added a few ounces of aluminum and hardware to hide wires, tubes, and, in my mind, some unsightly geometry.
I added three bits of aluminum artistry to my Sonex. Two were simple, bent pieces of aluminum that covered wires as well as the Tygon tubes that conveyed the air that enlivened my airspeed indicator (ASI) and Lift Reserve Indicator. What can I say? I like my cabin tidy. Total weight for the aluminum, nut plates, and machine screws was probably 4 ounces. The holes I drilled in the fuselage verticals, for the machine screws, offset the weight gain by 0.25 ounces (I estimate). Removing the unneeded car keys from my pocket before each flight easily offset the added weight. More importantly, the added ounces relieved my somewhat OCD mind of the weight of seeing the wires and tubes. The effort, and ounces, paid dividends for 500 flight hours.
Another few ounces were added to deal with an unsightly intersection where the forward formers of the turtledeck converged in a sharp angle behind the cockpit. The angle juxtaposed against the curving turtledeck was an unwanted bit of Brutalism, easily corrected with another few ounces of aluminum and PK screws. No, I couldn’t see it in flight, but it drew my eye like a weed on a putting green when I was outside the airplane.
Yes, ounces equal pounds. But sometimes they equal peace of mind and add a bit of personalization.
I rehabbed the glare shield on my recently acquired RV-6 because it was just too ugly and constantly in view. It had this awful felt fabric glued to it and the “edge protection” was just a piece of -5 tubing split and jammed onto the edge and painted black. I removed the tubing and scraped off as much of the fabric as I could, but there was no way to get it clean enough to paint, at least not without de-bonding the canopy from the frame, so I made a new piece of 0.020” aluminum to overlay the existing glare shield, painted it flat black, then installed an upholstered glare shield trim piece from Classic Aero, which served to both dress up the edge and retain my new glare shield overlay. Definitely worth the 5-6oz to not have to stare at an ugly glare shield every time I fly.