After 9 days of not working on the airplane, I finally made it out to the garage. In all fairness, though, I spent all last week working out hard, and preparing for a bachelor party at Snowshoe. West Virginia, right? Yup. It was actually pretty cool there. It was in the midst of the big blizzard that bent the east coast over last week, so Showshoe got somewhere around 20 inches of snow. Legend…wait for it…dary.
Anyway, I had previously drilled out the front spar(VS-702) to tip rib (VS-706) rivets, so here are the replacements. The one on the left doesn’t look all that good, but this is my third try, and I think I am going to leave good enough alone.
Front spar to tip rib rivets. Left one sucks, but I'm not going to make it any worse.
Then, I reset the VS-704 root rib to front spar rivets. I set the middle one fine, then messed up the outer two. Drill out, and reset them just fine on the second try.
Looking good from this side.
Here’s a shot of the shop heads for those three rivets.
Here are the shop heads for those three. Not too bad.
Next, the instructions tell you to cleco on the skin and start riveting. Here’s a shot of me getting ready to rivet.
Start from the middle of the front spar and work outboard, then back to the start and work inboard. Then, rivet along the middle rib aft.
Here’s a shot of some shop heads. You’ll have to click on the picture to see them.
Nice looking shop heads. You can also see my interior skin masking practice. Looks good, doesn't it?
More shop heads.
Another shot of the shop heads for VS-702 front spar and VS-707 middle rib.
And one more…
Once I get the other side of the skin riveted, I can take off the blue vinyl from the inside of the skins.
After riveting one side of the skin, I had to head inside to watch UNC play Dook. (Yes, that is how you spell Dook.)
Starting to look like something that could fly.
One hour today. I drilled out 3 rivets , set 5 rivets on the skeleton and 39 on the left VS skin. 44 total. Booyah.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 