I worked in sections today.
There was a big storm here last night, (and all of today), but I’ve learned that cleaning off the driveway is a lot easier if you do it when it is 3″ two times instead of once after 6″ has accumulated. Here’s what I woke up to this morning.
Snow!
Here’s after about an hour of shoveling. Good workout.
Coming down fast, but at least I cleared off the first 6".
Then, I got the c-frame out and finished the VS skin dimpling. I replaced the blue tape on the male die, and got almost no circles.
Simple but effective dimpling setup.
Then I countersunk all of the lower forward spar reinforcement holes from the plans. I haven’t used the countersink since I had to countersink HS-710 and HS-714 to accept a #30 dimple, so the countersink cage was already set up. All I had to do was verify in a piece of scrap. Yup. It’s perfect.
Beautiful countersinking.
Then, I cleaned and primed one interior side of the vertical skin, then the other. Here’s the first side drying.
Hurry up and wait to dry.
After finishing the second side and letting it dry, I pulled the forward section of vinyl off of the interior side of the skin. During assembly, no bucking bars will be needed in there, so there is no risk of scratching. Then I finished edge finishing the ribs, spars, and rear spar reinforcement, and primed each one. I didn’t prime them sitting perfectly horizontal, so I got some runs and some nastiness; some of them ended up getting touched up, and some got a second coat. After they were all dry, I cleco those bad boys together in preparation for riveting.
Skeleton and rear spar taking shape.
I started with the skeleton, middle rib. Here’s my first VS rivet.
First VS rivet.
Then, I moved to the tip. See the upper rivet? The skins are sitting flush, this will have to be drilled out.
Ahhh! I suck at riveting.
And the lower rivet there started to bend over. I’ll have to drill out both rivets.
Two rivets to be drilled out.
Back to the middle rib, two more perfect rivets.
There are pretty good. I need to make sure that bottom one is driven enough.
See the fourth rivet from the right? Started to bend over, so I’m going to drill it out. Also, I’m going to put the shop heads on the thicker material here, also, they’ll be easier to inspect.
Uh oh. See the third rivet from the right? I was supposed to wait and rivet this with the skeleton. Slow down and follow the directions!
Two more rivets to be drilled out.
But I was feeling good about squeezing, so I kept going. Until these 4 rivets. Terrible…they all started to bend over. I think my rivet squeezer sucks. I have to squeeze really hard and it it tough to keep everything aligned. I think after I drill these out I am going to shoot and buck these.
4 bad rivets to be drilled out.
At this point, I had to walk away, I was tired, frustrated, and not making any progress. Ugh.
So far, 3.5 hours. I set some rivets today, but I’m not going to count any of them until I drill them out. I’ll update the rivet count later.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 