Another quick night in the shop. First thing, I fired up my 6″ grinder (with a scotchbrite wheel attached) and edge-finished half of the stiffeners. After that (about 45 minutes of the total 1 hour in the shop), I started the stiffener to skin drilling dance.) In this first picture, I’ve just placed the elevator trim backing plate in plate for the effect. On the right, my first two holes drilled (into a sacrificial piece of MDF) on the bottom of the left elevator.
Bottom of the left elevator, working from inboard to outboard.
Here are three of the shorter stiffeners drilled, and the forward most hole on the last four drilled.
3 done, 4 to go.
All of them drilled.
Next, I uncleco the assembly from the table, and recleco just the front and back holes of the stiffener so I can flip the skin over to match-drill the last hole (it’s prepunched in the skin, but not the stiffener on a couple of the stiffeners). Then, I traced around the stiffeners with a sharpie, then pulled them off and clecoed them to the outside of the skin, again, to trace them with a sharpie. This will help me figure out where to remove the blue vinyl later instead of just guessing (like I did with the right elevator.
Of course, the stiffeners don't go on the outside of the skins, I am using them to mark the outside of the skin for devinyling.
See? All traced.
The inside, too.
lastly, I removed the stiffeners and marked them before prep for priming.
B2 is upside labelled upside-down. Maybe I should remake the stiffener. /sarcasm off.
One boring hour today.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 