Well, nothing too exciting, except I got to bang* on some rivets.
* By “bang” I mean “squeeze.”
After the other night, I have 7 z-brackets that are matchdrilled to the spar. Six of those seven need nutplates on them.
I grabbed a cleco, a (sacrifical) nutplate, an AN3-4A bolt, and a handful of washers (so I don’t engage the locking portion of the nutplate).
Bolt with washers goes in the hole, nutplate on top, hand tighten in a reasonably aligned orientation, and drill one of the holes for the nutplate ears through the angle.
Then, add a cleco and drill the other side.
Easy as PIE.
See? Easy!
After completing the first three sets, I snapped this picture.
3 down, many to go.
I think it was…[thinking]…6 angles, three bolts each, 2 holes for each bolt…36 holes?.
After all was said and done, the sacrifical nutplate had been thoroughly abused.
I almost threw it away, but then decided to keep him in his own little container. I can't just throw away a nutplate that has served me that well!
I deburred the holes that won’t be countersunk, and moved on to countersinking. I thought about using oops rivets, but since this material is so thick, I went ahead and countersunk for a full-depth AN426AD3-4 rivet.
Guess what I found when I picked up my countersink cage?
IT WAS ALREADY SET FOR THE PROPER DEPTH! WUHOOOOO!
(It’s the little things in life that really matter.)
Anyway, here’s one hole done.
Looks okay here...let's try a rivet.
Perfect depth.
While I was countersinking, I went ahead and did the FRONT side of the spar, too. (The nutplates go on the back of the spar, the bolts for the inboard z-brackets are fed in from the front.)
The countersink on the far left isn't perfect, I need to revisit this before riveting. The cage prevented me from getting a good angle on it.
Then, back to the z-brackets for some riveting.
First one done.
Then, onto the rest. All clecoed up, ready for rivets (in the background).
R3-R7 read to go.
Then, after setting 36 rivets, I set them all back up on the spar. No bolts yet, though. I’ll save that for tomorrow.
You can see R1 (which fell over) through R6 here. R7 is hiding behind the leading edge.
It’s late, and I need to get inside to bed.
But first, I grabbed all the tank parts for the right tank and quickly mocked them up with no clecos in my cradles. That’s the baffle leaning up against the cradles in the foreground.
I'm actually looking forward to the tank. Kind of.
It was just over an hour, but not quite an hour and a half. I think I rounded down last time, so this time, I’m going to call it an hour and a half.
Oh, and I almost forgot, I had to drill one rivet out. Just plain old messed it up.
Until next time…
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 