Jacks & Lasers

Not done with fiberglass fun quite yet I decided to tackle the wheel pants and fairings while I wait on the engine and prop. There's a bit of a problem though that it requires you to lift the wheels off the ground and level the plane, as it would be in flight.  Problem is my factory floor isn't level so when I tried to do this with a few saw horses and shims I quickly found out that wasn't going to work.

I began to look for solutions and came across this VAF thread and this build log post.  The concept is fairly easy in that you take a bottle jack and mount it to some sort of base with uprights to keep it from falling over.  For the top you mount something that will help disperse the weight and prevent the jack from shooting through your plane like this....

I would love to have welded up a base and may plan on doing that at a later date but for now I was trying to go as simple as possible. Cost wise these ran just over $100 with a majority of it going to the $46 jacks themselves.  It only took a few hours to put together as well, most of that time being spent cutting and flattening the ends of the uprights.  I did this in a vice and finished up with a hammer.  Then ran them through the band saw and took any burrs off the ends with a grinder.

For the tops I also went pretty simple.  I drilled a hole about halfway through a 2x4 and then screwed that to a flat top piece.  Then I covered it all with carpet and it just sits on top of the jack.  It's secure enough that it's not going to fall off and loose enough that it can shift around a bit.  I bought the last two jacks they had at the store so once is orange and one is red. On the bright sight if I'm working with someone on jacking the plane up I can easily identify which jack to mess with...

Plane Jacks

 It's important for the wheel pants to be inline, leveled and at the right angles.  I was trying to do this with squares, string and levelers and having a hard time.  I decided to pick up a cheap $60 laser leveler and it's helped make the progress a lot easier.  I hadn't used one of these in the past so still learning about them but they seem to be a great tool for this step so far.