Shop March 10th

March 10th

Shop

I spent several hours today working on the shop. I wanted to get the shelve up and installed and remove all the cardboard boxes I had been using to protect the floor in the painting area and lay down some protective paper. The cardboard had to many cracks and opening so it was impossible to clean the dust out of that area.

Installed the second header board. This one I bought a 2X6 and 3" anchor bolts, it feels a lot more solid than the doubled up 2X4s.

Finished the shelf and loaded all the finished pieces as well as the longer fuselage parts. Making all the cuts with a battery powered circular saw is less than ideal. If I keep doing wood working Im going to need to buy a table say and a miter saw. Im thinking about trying to build some furniture pieces for me apartment so who knows...

Have the floor cleaned up and the paper down in the paint booth area.

 Decided to move the back shelving unit to the other was to clean up the space.

Shop 3.0 Hours

Horizontal Stabilizer and Shop March 8

March 8

Horizontal Stabilizer

Got back to the shop today, spent most of the time deburring the rest of the HS ribs.

The Emery Cloth does a really nice job of getting into the tighter parts on the ribs are deburring. I am starting with the dremel green Scoth-Brite pads, then going over it with the 320 grit and finally the 600. I was just the 400 and calling it good, but I got worried it was to course. So a little extra time, but it makes me feel better. Then i do all the edges with the Scoth-Brite wheel that it can reach, that thing deburs in no time, so much easier!

Finally finished all the deburring!

Next the plans have you bend angles onto 4 or the pieces, this was easy enough just used the edge seamer and bent slightly. 

Now I have to make cradles to build the HS structure in. The plans say to use the shipping container wood, which is nice because I need to cut that up and clear out the space its taking up in the shop anyway.

Final HS jigs.

Shop

Next I decided t cut up the rest of the shipping crate to get it out of my space.

I repurposed the 2x4 legs to use as header boards for the raised storage shelf I said I wanted to put in.

Stopped by home depot on the way home and picked up the rest of the wood that I think I need to build my shelf. Ive never done this before, and I intend to put the finished pieces up there so the are stores safe until I need them in final assembly so I really hope google didn't lie to me about how to install header boards!

Horizontal Stabilizer 3.0 Hours, Shop 2.5 Hours

Horizontal Stabilizer January 22nd

January 22nd

Horizontal Stabilizer

Worked on riveting the horizontal stabilizer front and rear spars today. I thought it would be very straight forward and it would If I could get the squeezer to work properly. But I ended up having to set the rivets with a rivet gun and bucking bar. I didn’t realize it at first but the proximity of the rivets to the flanges on the spars meant I was scratching the primer and even gouging the metal with the bucking bar. I primed over all the spots and it wasn’t till later that it occurred to me I need to work the metal to smooth out he gouges to prevent any stress cracks in those locations.

Got a little more practice drilling out rivets, which I’m getting much better at, so thats nice that when I need to I’m not enlarging the rivet hole to much.

I’m thinking about mailing the squeezer back to the company and have them test it, I still think its my setting up of the squeezer, but I’m wondering if the tool itself to not developing power? They company says in 15 years they have only every had 2 that didn’t work as intended and everything else it operator error so my assumption is its me, but I can’t be sure without them testing it.

Horizontal Stabilizer 6.5 Hours

Horizontal Stabilizer January 17th

January 17th

Horizontal Stabilizer
I started out today deburring the Front HS Spar same process at the Rear from yesterday. Then I cut the Front HS Spar Stiffeners with the Dremel and deburred them, mostly with the Scotch-Brite wheel.

After cutting the stiffeners I had to clamp them to the Front Spar for match drilling. This was the first time on the project that I had to do this much fabrication. Especially with lining up the stiffeners to ensure they were aligned correctly. First you drill the Spar Web, remove the stiffeners debur the parts, re-clamp the part, and drill the flanges. Then repeat for the lower stiffener.

After this I Match Drilled and Final Drilled the Spar doubler. There are a handful of drill sizes and several needed to be counter sunk, so basically...Pay Attention!

Shop

I am running out of floor space so I have decided to hang a shelf up high with a piece of plywood to store parts, finished and raw.

Horizontal Stabilizer 7.5 Hours, Shop 1.5 Hours

Finishing the Rudder Start the Horizontal Stab January 16th

January 16th

Rudder
Finished rolling the leading edges and pop riveting the rudder today!! It is done!

Horizontal Stabilizer

I started on the HS today. I started with the rear spar and rear spar doubler deburring. I knew I wanted to prime smaller batches of parts this time around to see if I get a better finished product, so instead of drilling and mocking up the entire HS then disassembling, deburring, prep for primer, and priming. I am going to prime parts as I go in batches that make sense for sub assembly. To this end I jumped ahead in the plans and machine counter sunk the holes for the HS skin in the spar. Vans says that counter sink holes for dimpled skins should be 7 clicks on a micrometer countersink tool with .001" increments more than you would set it for just counter sinking a rivet. Since I knew I would be priming I set it to 10 clicks, this is just a wag on how think I think the primer is. Now that Im writing this I should set the rivet in the primed holes to see how it looks compared to a test piece counter sunk to the correct 7 click depth.

Same Deburring as before. Scotch-brite wheel for the long edges, Dremel tool for the lightening holes, and finish everything with Maroon Scotch-brite pads.

Paint

Since I knew I was going to pain in a few days. I didn't want to have the same problem with clumpy primer as before so I set the primer in the drill press with a paint stirrer and let it run. Initially this backfired because the whole can spun and primer went everywhere. Duck tape to the rescue. In reality this time the primer color chunks seemed to mix themselves back into suspension and a stir stick would have worked, but dam it I bought the stirrer and wanted to see how it worked! In the end the primer was ready when I needed it.

Rudder 1.5 Hours, Horizontal Stabilizer 3.0 Hours

Finishing the Rudder January 15th

January 15th

Rudder
Back to riveting the ridder together. I started with the rudder horn and leading edge, then moved onto the common holes for the skins and the spar.

The Root end of the rudder had a bit more skin to the point where the squeezer just barely reached and caused a few miss squeezes on my part. So more drilling rivet practice!

Next I installed the counter weight, no pictures sadly, the counter weight needed a bit of trimming to clear the shop heads of the rivets. Also, the plans call for the leading edge to be riveted together after you install the counter weight. This is impossible, you can't get a bucking bar between the leading edge of the rudder horn and the weight once its installed so I had to unistall the weight and set the rivets first. Then I installed the top rib, which covers the counter weight and caps the rudder. But since I had riveted the rudder horn trailing edge already I had to drill out the 2 top rivets because they are common with the rib.

Some how in the assembly process I missed installing a rivet in the lower row of the rudder??? Since it was 1 away from trailing edge everything was really tight and I couldn't get a bucking bar behind it....so more rivet drilling and a piece of wood to wedge between the piece solved that problem.

Next I moved onto the dreaded trailing edge. Vans recommends that you half shoot every 10th rivets starting in the middle and working your way outward. Then half shooting the middle of every 10th and the middle of those and again until they are all half set. Then go back and fully set them all using the same patter. On one of the forums I saw a guy put tape down and numbered the rivets pattern and I thought this was a good idea so I copied it, and used the back riveting technique to set the rivets.

I really couldn't be more happy with how the trailing edge turned out. Im not sure I could make it any straighter.

I then moved on to rolling the leading edge. The plans have to tape a broom handle to the metal and roll it to introduce the bend before you rivet so the sheets are not preloaded and likely to crack in the future. This turned out to be really easy, but I had to make things hard by rolling the bottom one first which made it difficult to work the upper ones since the rudder horn made using the broom handle only possible from below.

Rudder 6.0 Hours