After last night’s bummer of a screw up (mis-drilling the aileron spar reinforcement plates), I woke up in a cold sweat.
I thought I was going to have to order four more little plates, just to pay some ungodly amount of shipping from Van’s to here.
Then I rememberered the “Trim Bundle” than Van’s sends you. I think there may be some 0.040″ in there.
Sure enough (after measuring, finding some 0.045″, then taking the blue plastic off, and seeing that it was really 0.040″), I had something to continue working on the ailerons.
I went ahead and marked some 0.032" that I found, as well.
After some measuring, marking, and trimming, I have 4 new pieces.
Old and new.
Instead of clamping these to the spar, I decided to just use the old pieces to matchdrill the new ones.
I've clamped the new pieces under the old ones, but in the OTHER orientation.
After some drilling, scuffing, edge-finishing, and marking, I had four new reinforcement plates.
Like new.
I clamped them to the spar, and marked the appropriate holes for countersinking.
There are two holes on the outboard end of each spar, too.
After that, I looked around, and figured there was nothing else to do except start some stiffener fabrication.
I hate making stiffeners (see title of post for emphasis). It takes forever, there are pieces of aluminum flying everywhere, your hands get cut up, but, it’s necessary.
After about an hour of cutting, filing, snipping, edge finishing, and scuffing, I have 32 beatiful stiffeners to go into the aileron skins.
8 on each of the upper and lower surfaces of each aileron.
That sucked, but as long as I can salvage the rudder stiffeners, I think those were my last stiffeners!
2.0 hours.
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 