Phew! I needed a few days there to recover and also catch up on some work. The late night on Tuesday building and then the actual drive in movie and event on Wednesday really knocked me out. So lets see what I remember fro those crazy couple of days.
*(Ill add the photos in after so if you read this and there are no photos, give it a few minutes while I edit and add them in)*
On Monday I had put all the parts onto the ion arm but I noticed the paint wasn't quite dry enough to do much else.
On Tuesday the paint still hadn't fully cured, but I wasn't leaving finger prints in the paint anymore. It did kind of push out from where parts were attached to the shell, but I figured these are never coming off again, so only I would ever notice.
Ill find a photo of what I mean.
I attached all the parts and everything was going smoothly until I got to the injector tubes. I wanted to go screen on these and rivet them in, so I riveted the bracket to the tubes and then started to attach the tubes in with the bolts in the power cell area. The problem I had was when I drilled the bracket to the shell originally. I didn't do a very good job and it was a little to far out, but it was ok on the dry fit because it pushed the tubes out plum rather then without it and they leaned in towards the shell. Make sense? That was fine because it wasn't attached to the tubes yet. When I started to tighten the bolts to the shell, I couldn't flex anything to get the rivets to go through the brack and the holes in the shell. we were talking like 3/32 out, I figured I could flex it enough like when i did the dry fit. But it just wouldn't. I ended up reaming out the mounting holes for the bracket and the tubes and with only a slight flex it fit nice and snug! I should have taken a photo of this before I attached the ribbon cable, but I was flying through the final assembly and pressed for time and didn't want to keep stopping for photos.
I got all the tubes run and hoses on and in the end I did go with my real legris straights rather than the GBFans replicas. What I did to make sure the tubing was tight, because I didn't want to glue it, was stick a small piece of a Q Tip stick in the tube and it firmed it up enough to fit in the straights. But that was too thick to fit in the legris elbow replicas, so for that I wrapped a small bit of of scotch tape on the end. It was a trial and error process, but I found slightly under a full wrap was enough to hold it. Any more and it would bunch up when trying to go in. I did have to super glue in a few of the fittings in so they would have the proper orientation. The Ion arm cap, beam line (or filler tube I never remember which is which) and the the 2 on the HGA.
With the pot for the crank knob, I used Bishopdonmiguel's tip on sticking a piece of metal in the gap to stop it from squeezing together. No photo on this, sorry, but all i did was find a washer that was the right thickness and grind it down to the shape I needed. Perfect fix! No more wobbly crank knob!
The 2 little holes I drilled in the attenuator discs, looked pretty good in the end with paint. Almost like I had used rivets. Close enough anyway.
Lesson: Let the paint dry!!! Don't rush it!! I'm still not sure if it's completely cured yet.