Finished with floor and walls in new shop

Last bits of wall and floor in the new shop is finished, at last.

Oiling the shop floor

The floor was dry enough to oil. Did the "plastic test" over night, and no moisture seen. The function of the oil is apparently to penetrate and bind the concrete to make it less brittle, and to withstand water and oils. Unlike paint, the wear will be on the concrete itself, but since the oil make the surface much less brittle, it doesn't shed particles (dust) so the surface will last forever. The surface becomes very hard and ductile, and this is what is used in parking houses amongst other things.

This is all fine, but the oil also makes the floor look very ugly! I'll let it dry until tomorrow and decide if I also put some paint on it (the oil also function as a primer).

Maintenance

A couple of weekends ago I attended a course in maintenance at EAA Norway at Kjeller airport. This course is required to do 100h/yearly maintenance on an experimental aircraft that you have built yourself. It was an interesting course and I also met several other builders (not many around where I live).

Painted the half of the walls in the shop. Then I have to move stuff around to paint the other half. On the floor I will simply use something called concrete oil, but I have to wait another month or two until the concrete floor is fully dry. Wondering about using the lower half of IKEA kitchen furniture as building bench along the one of the walls.

Drilled holes in elevator hinge plate

Drilled the holes in the attachment plates for the elevator hinge. Then I did a cleanup of the whole shop (long overdue). Wrote into the build logbook all the things done last year(copyed from this blog). This logbook will follow the airplane throughout its lifetime.

The shop is getting ready

The kit should (finally) arrive this week, and the shop is getting ready. It's the previous living room/kitchen of an apartment in my house that i used to rent out. From now on it will se much better use as a manufactoring shop for an RV-4. The shop measures 3.5 by 7 meters and is heated.

The kitchen furniture is still there. I think hot/cold water, a sink and lots of drawer space will come in handy. I have added proper lighting, a compressor and a working table.

The working table is an old door i had lying around. I mounted it to the wall and added 3 feets, so it should be both flat and sturdy. The compressor is a belt driven Einhel AirTek 4000. It can deliver 300 standard liters per minute at 10 bar, and should more than enough for all the tools (except painting). I still need another table for table mounted tools, this will be added in the coming days.