Taylor and I came SO close to finishing the flap today, but my amazing fiance had some chicken parm in the oven, and by the time the clock struck 6pm, we had to head in to get cleaned up.
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. (The chicken parm was SO good.)
Anyway, I started the day off by finishing up some dimpling, cleaning, and priming of the two very small shims that go on the aft two holes of each end rib.
Not very exciting, but here they are.
Then, I clecoed on the top skin.
I”m so excited it’s going together for the final time.
While Taylor worked the cleco pliers to get the flap assembled to “every other hole,” I grabbed the flap side of the hinge from the wing and prepped it.
Deburred, and filed down the stump where there used to be an extra “eye.” Yes, that’s Dentyne in the background.
Gotta have fresh breath while building.
Here’s Taylor putting some rivets with tape in every other hole.
Nice action shot. I don’t get many of those when I’m building solo.
After blazing through the lower skin and ribs (goes really fast when one person is doing the clecoing and rivet-placing).
I love this part of building.
I did run into a small problem though. On the left flap, I waited to rivet the nutplate on the backside of the inboard rib. On this flap, I did it early, but then got stuck with one of the rivets. not enough room for a bucking bar, so I reverted to a blind rivet.
That one right in the middle. No big deal.
After flipping over the flap and getting all the top side rivets done (including getting the spar blind riveted into the ribs and the top skin rivets to the spar…
Oh man, we’re so close!
We don’t have that many more rivets to do. (Most of the outboard rib rivets, then the hinge-spar-lower skin rivets. That’s it.
1.5 hours today, but Taylor was so productive, I’m counting all his hours, too.
3.0 hours on the clock, 179 rivets.
PROGRESS!!!!!
Andrew's RV-7 Build Log 