Andrew's RV-7 Build Log

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Over this past weekend, I got a few moments out in the garage here and there, some of those accompanied by my son.

I did a little more work on the rudder, final-drilling and deburring the remaining stiffener holes.

Whose arm is that?

Also, 16 more rivets drilled out of the rudder tip rib. I need access below the tip rib to buck the new rudder skins to the counterbalance skins.

after all drilling and deburring.

Finally, with skin dimpling coming soon, I built a couple c-frame tables. Instead of making the fancy one with the slot for the c-frame to slide into, I just made two bigger ones.

Before covering.

After covering.

I made sure the female dimple die on the bottom was only slightly higher than the surface of the tables.

We’ll see how it works over the next few days.
2.0 hours over 3 days. 16 rivets drilled out.

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Another exciting night in the shop. T-Rex (that’s what I’m calling him for now) helped me, too.

Since the rudder skeleton is now fully ready, We dug out the new skins and got them devinyled. Last time around, I would have used a soldering iron to draw lines down the rivet holes and peel off just the blue vinyl we needed to. This time, we just pulled it all off. I guess I’m at a different point in my life now.

Virgin skin, v2.0.

Fast forward about an hour, and we had both sides of both skins devinyled.

Now, what do you do with a toddler while you are trying to enlarge the prepunched holes to #40? YOU GIVE HIM A PERMANENT MARKER and tell him he can draw on any blue or silver airplane part.

I hope there are no blue or silver pieces of furniture in the house…

So, after a few passes with the drill, the Left Rudder skin is now ready for deburring and dimpling.

So shiny and smooth!

I forgot how slow this goes. 1.5 hours on the rudder. (Oh, I upped the “reordered parts count” up to 9 (from 6). Even though I didn’t order them, they were purchased for the kit (by the gentleman who bought, then sold my kit back to me).

Oh, and today marks the passing of 400 build hours. Only took me 9 years to get here.
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So after almost 9 months of not working on the airplane project, we finally got through enough of the rennovation (finishing basement) to get started in the garage again. No, I haven’t painted the walls or ceiling yet, but I did want to get the airplane pictures I’ve been lugging around for years actually mounted to the wall. Wifey helped me decide on the wall. This wall is the least likely to get hit with other shop-related thrashing. Notice the blank space behind the ladder where I’ll inevitably bump it against the wall.

After a lot of years of not feeling settled in a workshop, I finally have a wall of shame. (Signed pictures of companies I’ve left.)

We’ve been spending quite a bit of time outside, but we finally focused on the airplane for 30 minutes. My almost-3 year old son was really eager to help, so I taught him out to use a squeezer. The task for today was to push out all the rivets from the individual parts. When drilling the shop heads off, the parts came apart, but sometimes the shaft of the rivet remained in the underlying structure. We’re using half of a dimple die to push them out.

T-Rex heliping push some half-drilled rivets out of holes.

I wasn’t intentionally trying to hide his face, but he really wanted the focus of the picture to be on the “airpwane part.”

Look Ma! No more rivet remnants.

Here’s what we are pushing out.

Here’s what we were pushing out.

And the final product of the day.

After pushing through some more of the ruddder stiffeners, a complete set.

And I need to catch you all up on some other developments. I haven’t just been sitting around doing NOTHING on the airplane for years and years. I settled on gray Crow harnesses. 5pt with Rotary Cam and black hardware. Also, the black adjusters.

Also over the last year, my crow 5 pt. harnesses showed up.

With aluminum adjusters.

Here’s the cam release. Very high quality.

A zoomed out shot.

And, while thinking long and hard about it, I called Andair directly and bought the 5-way fuel selector directly from them. It was a few extra dollars (maybe $40 extra), but now I have the ability to carry an aux tank. I don’t think I’ll build an extra tank (or two) now, but I wanted the expansion capability.

And, I bought a 5-way fuel valve straight from the source.

Here’s the data sheet. Kind of.

0.5 hours tonight. I won’t count T-Rex’s time at all yet. Maybe when he’s older.
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A quick day in the shop today, split between parts storage and actual rudder work.

I’ve read a lot recently about pulling the vinyl off of the skins to avoid corrosion under the vinyl, and since I decided not to polish, I am much less worried about small scratches and scuffs.

To that end, I pulled the vinyl off of the horizontal stabilizer and elevators in preparation for trophy mounting.

Part-way through the HS.

And onto the elevators.

The portable heater instantly made the vinyl peel off easier.

Finally (and without many pictures), I finished the rudder skeleton liberation.

The old damaged skin is now sitting in my new skin storage on the wing cradle. Perhaps for future scrap.

Not sure why the pictures are in this order, but I quickly mounted the elevators to the horizontal, and mounted the assembly on the far wall of the garage.

Trophy!

1.5 hours of work. 1.0 in Miscellanous, and .5 in rudder.

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Walking back out to the garage tonight, I walked past the cardboard box in which the replacement skins were shipped, and saw this.

There were no dollars in this box…

…which was a throwback an early post 8 years ago when I took this picture:

That was a long time ago.

Anyway, after finishing the stiffener salvaging from the right half of the rudder, I peeled open the skins, and took this self-portrait.

So handsome.

Anyway, an hour later, I had liberated all 16 stiffeners from the rudder WITHOUT any damage.

This was quite the commplishment.

in total, 105 more rivets drilled out from the right skin, and 116 total rivets drilled from the left skin. (221 drilled out total).

I still have some spar rivets to drill out before starting real construction again, but I’m on my way.

(BTW, my drilled out percentage is now 8.78%. ugh.)

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