I Love Tungsten (Started Riveting Right Elevator)

May 8, 2010

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Well, this morning, the girlfriend ran some errands, and I got my house chores done early, so I headed out to the garage to make some loud noises. Recently, I’ve been taking one component at a time from drilled through primed. It make my work sessions less boring (not a full day of deburring lots of parts, but rather one day of drilling, deburring, scuffing, dimpling, cleaning, and priming one part).

Anyway, today, it was the right elevator spar’s turn.

First, deburring. There's my oversize drill bit spun in my fingers.

Then I put a nice scuff on all sides and edges.

Scuffed and edge finished.

Then, I broke out the tank dies to do some dimpling.

I love these dies. Such high quality.

I know you guys have seen tons of dimples from me, but I still take pictures.

The male side.

And the female side. Apparently I have not edge-finished yet.

After finished dimpling, I grabbed this shot down the length of the spar.

Right elevator spar, dimpled.

I forgot to take a picture of the countersinking I had to do on the front (flanged) side of the spar. The spar needs to be countersunk to hold the flush rivets attaching the E-709 Root Rib Right. The elevator control horn fits over them.

Then, inside for cleaning and back outside to the paint booth.

One side primed.

While I was waiting for the back side of the spar to dry, I went ahead and pulled the vinyl off both sides of the E-713 counterbalance skin.

The vinyl comes off a lot more easily when it is warm out.

Then, I got the other side of the spar primed, and prepped for some riveting. I had already prepped and primed the two reinforcement plates that get riveted to the back of the spar.

There's my new tungsten bucking bar.

Here’s my setup for spar riveting.

You can't see the reinforcement plate, but those clecos are holding it on.


After 8 rivets, all I can say is…WOW. I love this tungsten bucking bar. 8 perfect rivets. With the older, and smaller, bar I was using before, things were always bouncing around, and my hand was vibrating, etc. With this bar, it is so easy to rivet. I should have bought this at the beginning of the project.

Wow, these are amazing shop heads.

Here's the other side.

I spent about 2 minutes just staring at the bar. Amazing.

I thought I would show you my grip.

8 more, also perfect.

Wuhoo, this bucking bar is great!

And, the other side of those.

I wanted to buck these, but I thought it would be better to squeeze them.

The spar to E-709 rivets.

These are the flush rivets I was talking about earlier. Of course, when the primer is only 30 minutes old, and you try to clean up some smudges with MEK, the primer will rub off. Duh.

I re-shot some primer over this right after this picture.

What a great day. I got to make loud noises, and I’m in love (sorry girlfriend) with my new tungsten bucking bar.

20 rivets in 1.5 hours. Good day.

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Posted by Andrew

Primed E-709 Root Rib Right

May 3, 2010

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Well, after a few days of no work, then a few more of yardwork, and a few more of more no work, I made it into the garage tonight for an hour of work. Now that summer is approaching, the garage is getting a little humid. I’m going to start thinking about buying a portable air conditioner.

Tonight’s main task was to get any piece of the right elevator ready for assembly. E-709 (Root rib right) seemed to be a good candidate.

On the right, my trusty scotchbrite pad. In the middle, E-709 (Root Rib right). On the left. Well. You may call that beer. I call it "delicious."

Anyway, after deburring and scuffing, I broke out the #40 tank dies (understructure, so I want the dimples slightly deeper) and did all but the aft two holes on top and bottom.

Dimpling.

For my hard to reach places, I use a steel bar with a countersunk hole in it, put the hole of interest on top, and put in a sacrificial rivet to use as a male dimple die. Then, I grab a flush set, and push the rivet into the hole in the steel.

Getting ready to ghetto-dimple.

Here’s a closeup of my steel bar for you to admire. The hole on the right is what I use for these tasks.

The hole on the left is useless, since I drilled it too far away from the edge of the bar. Dumb me.

Anyway, here’s a shot of one side of the E-709 after using this technique.

The bottom dimple is from the tank dies, the top two are with the rivet trick. Not perfect, but not bad for the hard-to-reach area. Based on my experiences on the rudder, the skin will sit just fine in these dimples.

Off to the paint-shop. And by paint-shop, I mean “a piece of cardboard on my trash and recycling bins.”

Up with the garage door for ventilation and on with the respirator before shooting the first coat.

While that dried, I snapped an action shot of me devinyling the inside of the skins. I also deburred all of the exterior sides of the recently drilled holes, but didn’t get to the insides, I’ll do that as soon as I get back into the shop.

Oh man, those stiffeners and rivets look nice.

Here are both interior sides done. (And by “done” I mean “done devinyling with just the parts I’m going to deburr, scuff, dimple, and prime.”) The rest of the vinyl will come off just before riveting, and will reveal nice untouched (and unprimed) alclad.

Pretty pretty.

Crap, I forgot to take a picture of me shooting primer on the other side of E-709, which is the entire basis for the title of today’s post. If you feel shortchanged, feel free to complain.

One hour.

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Posted by Andrew

Bent Right Elevator Trailing Edge

April 28, 2010

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What a great night in the shop tonight. And, the airplane actually forced me to get something done on the house!

After work today, I needed to stop by the Aviation Depot to buy some hinges, wood, and an 1/8″ dowel rod for elevator trailing edge bending.

Since we’ve been wanting to upgrade the hardware in our house for awhile, I decided to buy the nice hinges, and used the replaced hinges for my bending brake.  Here’s a shot of our powder room door, mid-installation.

Top hinge is the new “oil-rubbed bronze” hinge. Bottom hinge is the old (builder standard) hinge. Looks a lot better.

Up close. I like the new one a lot better. (Later, I went around and made sure all of the crosses in the screw heads were straight up and down. It’s an anal retentive thing I do, especially with light switch plates.)

Anyway, after a ton of VAF research, Orndorff video watching, and builder website reading, I settled on the “other” method, which puts the hinges on the long face, and really only bends with the short side of the 2×4 (or 2×8 cut in half). You really only want that much bending the skin anyway, because the bend needs to occur locally at the radius, not away from the trailing edge. If the wood is imparting force in the middle of the skin, you will end up with the dreaded “bulge.”

Here’s my bending brake being assembled. I had six hinges, so why use them. I grabbed these 2×4, which were nice and straight, and just long enough for the trailing edge. I’ll need to replace these for the flaps and ailerons. I read somewhere they need to be more like 5 feet long for those.

Here it is after assembly. On the left, you can see my skin, that needs to be bent. In the middle, the three dowel rods I purchased. While I was standing in the store, 1/8″ seemed too small, so I bought a few different sizes at $0.50 each. Of course, everyone was right on, 1/8″ is perfect.

I’m going to put the trailing edge of the skin in the little opening at the bottom of the brake (as it is oriented in the picture).

First thing,  I screwed my bending brake to my 2nd workbench with one of the bending surfaces flush with the bench top.

Bending brake, installed.

Then, I put the 1/8″ dowel into the trailing edge of the skin and taped it in place. (Not shown in the following picture, because I was recreating the process for the camera. Look 2 pictures down for the dowel rod.) Then, you put the skin in the brake all the way against the hinges, and start bending.

This is not a fast process. It takes a surprising amount of force. I thought it was going to be a one shot deal, but it takes a lot of bending. You start with the skin against the hinges, then bend around the dowel. That took a whole bunch of times (I was stopping a lot to inspect). Then, you move the skin a little away from the hinge, and bend again. This allows you to really form the edge around the dowel.

If you pretend there is a dowel rod in there, this would be the first bend.

Here’s where I could get to with the dowel rod in place.

About halfway there.

Then, you remove the dowel rod and keep going, same deal, but a lot more gently, because I didn’t want to squeeze the trailing edge too much (now there is no dowel rod to prevent squash-age.

I thought this was good enough, but this is about 3/4 the way there.

Of course, because I thought that was good enough, I clecoed the skeleton into the skin.

It’s starting to look like something that could be considered an elevator.

But, after grabbing my straightedge, I’m getting some “fall-off” before the radius. This happens because the radius hasn’t been formed well, and then you pull the skin down to the skeleton, and it bends close to the trailing edge. It’s not terrible, but I know I can do better.

It’s not the dreaded bulge, but it is some pretty good “fall-off.”

Another shot.

No good here either.

Near the inboard edge.

Hmm. I unclecoed, and grabbed this shot. I’m about an inch from where I need to be, and the tension I am putting on the skin to pull it to the skeleton is causing that slight bend near the trailing edge.

About an inch.

I put that bad boy back in the brake and kept going. This time, I used two BFPs (the “p” stands for pliers. I’ll let you figure out the “b” and “f”) on either side of the brake and finished it up nicely.

More bending.

There we go. I made up that last inch, and now it rests right where the skeleton would go.

Much better. Perfect, in fact.

Here’s an end-on shot.

How great is this? A perfect bend.

Let’s get out the straightedge.

No fall-off before the radius.

Another place on the elevator.

And again, no fall-off. So happy!

After all that, I pulled the vinyl off of the outside of the elevator skins in preparation for deburring.

Hey! There’s shiny aluminum under there. Let’s start putting this bad boy together.

Total, it was two hours tonight, including bending brake construction. It was a great 2 hours though. I am extremely happy with the results. I have a perfectly bent trailing edge.

Boo-yeah.

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Posted by Andrew

Drill Press!!!

April 26, 2010

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After the other day’s sucesess with fixing my dimpling errors, I need to run to the aviation department of my local big box store and grab a 6′ long 2×8 to cut in half and some hinges to make my homemade bending brake.

Instead of making it there, I had to stop by Harbor Freight to grab this drill press. Normally $90, I got a coupon in my email for $49.99. I can’t pass that up.

The box is a little damaged, but everything inside was okay.

A blurry shot of me starting to assemble.

Another in-process shot. This is surprisingly nice quality.

I had to install the little yellow knob to help open the lid. After this shot, I moved the belt down to the lowest speed (650 RPM, which is still pretty high).

I also bought these cool long pliers. I didn’t need them for the airplane specifically, but rather my girlfriend needed them to help clean out a hair clog in her sink in the bathroom. Good excuse to buy tools, and they don’t get accounted for on the airplane budget. Wuhoo!

Pretty nice pliers. I have a feeling I'll be using these often.

In the same email for the drill press, they wanted to sell me a (normally $15?) drill press vice for $7.99. Who am I to say no. I was a little disappointed that this one was only 2.5″. There were 4 sizes above it that looked nicer, but they exceeded my value-for-the-money threshold.

Drill press vise, also had via sale.

The allen wrench the drill press provided to help with assembly got filed away with my other extra allen wrenches.

You can see I am a little short on allen wrenches.

Back to the drill press vice. After a little cleaning, this thing doesn’t look half bad.

I'll have to find some bolts to mount this. Except I'll have to move it for different pieces. Maybe I'll just use clamps.

After a few minutes of trying to figure out where to put the drill press. This is what I settled on for now.

Notice I'm drinking sunset wheat tonight. Mmmm.

No hours tonight on the airplane, just tool assembly. Maybe I’ll grab some wood in the next few days to continue on the right elevator.

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Posted by Andrew

Fixed Right Elevator Trailing Edge

April 24, 2010

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I’ve been lacking in motivation recently due to some badly dimpled holes along the trailing edge of the right elevator. All last week, my error had been hanging over my head, and I was having trouble even motivating myself to fix them.

Saturday afternoon (writing this later) I mustered up some courage and drilled out 13 of the 14 trailing edge rivets on the right elevator. They are really not trailing edge rivets, but the aft-most rivets of each of the 14 stiffeners (7 on the upper skin, and 7 on the lower skin).

You can't even really see the damage in this picture...

Here’s a couple pictures of the damage.

You can see how the dimple kind of tweaked the skin. Boo damaged skin.

The above pictures was the worst one. This one was more typical.

A small ridge below the hole (in the picture) and a small dent above the hole (in the picture).

After getting them all drilled out (13 of them, one of them was good enough to leave alone), I set up the skin with a long backriveting plate underneath the offending holes and used a 2×4 laid spanwise on the stiffeners with some clamps to keep the skin surface flat. Then, I used 4 or 5 long pieces of tape to pull the upper skin back to allow plenty of room to work.

You can still see where the very trailing edge is starting to bend down. This is why I had the problem in the first place.

With no rivets in the holes, I used a small flush set (about 3/8″ diameter) and my rivet gun turned way down to flatten the dents (I’ll call them dents for dramatic purposes, but they were really just small impressions) and ridges (again, really just small high spots) flat. I put the flush set on either side of the existing dimple (which was okay, it was the area just outside of the dimple, where the edges of the dimple die set had tweaked the skin a little, where I was having my problem) and gave it a few taps.

After finishing one side, I took off the protective tape I was using and inspected. It ended up okay. I think if I were going to polish the empennage, it would bug me, but my latest paint scheme idea has me painting the elevators.

I did the other side, and then cleaned everything up, put some rivets back in the holes, and set up each side again with my fancy setup to actually backrivet the last hole of the stiffeners in place. It went perfectly, and I was really careful to hold everything very flat against the backriveting plate.

(By “perfectly,” I really mean “I messed up one of the holes, had to drill it out to #30 and use an oops rivet.” ) I’ll point it out.

Here are some examples of the replaced finished rivets.

This one looks great!

Pretty good. You can still kind of see where the damage was.

Holy crap, how did I do that to the rivet? This is the one that got drilled out again and replaced.

Here's the shop head for the oops rivet. This was my first real oops rivet. Not bad.

This one is okay.

Another very nice one.

It's not blurry in real life, I promise.

Whoa, who scratched my skin? It was probably the male part of the dimple die. That will hopefully polish out, (or it will get cleaned up and painted).

Another good one. In all of these, you can kind of see the larger diameter area that was dimpled.

This one is on the very end, as you can see the devinyling lines.

It looks the same as all the rest, of course, so you’ll never know, and I’ve already forgotten which side (top or bottom) it’s on.

Anyway, I drilled out 13 of the 14 original rivets, then had to redo one of those, so 14 rivets drilled out and reset successfully in an hour today. Not bad. I’ll add pictures when I can get them uploaded. Sorry for the lack of work recently.

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Posted by Andrew

Right Elevator Stiffener Riveting

April 18, 2010

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A few days ago I got a little time in on the project. I’ll see if I can remember what happened. 3 hours, 116 rivets…2 of them drilled out and reset. Here we go. First thing, in preparation for stiffener riveting was to get the skin devinyled. Here’s my devinyling table, wooden stick (won’t dissapate heat) and permanent marker.

Ready to use the soldering iron to devinyl.

After devinyling the inside of the right elevator skin.

For some reason I like devinyling. Don't ask me why.

Here’s the outside of the skin after devinyling. This actually takes a long time to do.

I just devinyled the stiffener holes. I'll devinyl the rest after drilling to the skeleton.

At some point last weekend (can’t remember which day), I was sent to Home Depot (maybe Lowe’s…it was a busy day) to grab some gardening supplies. I took the opportunity to grab some indoor/outdoor carpet for the workbenches.

Here's what I call my toolbench with a new carpet surface.

You should be able to see the “workbench”‘ with carpet on it in future pictures. Anyway, I grabbed the skin and did some deburring (interior and exterior) and some scuffing (interior only, for priming).

Scuffed strip on the left, non-scuffed on the right.

After a few more minutes, I dimpled the skin (no pictures, sorry), and then decided they were ready for priming.

Where is that self-etching primer?

i got the picture order backwards, so you’ll see the skin primed later, but here I am getting ready (or just finishing) stiffener edge prep. I usually use my Permagit block to knock down any ridges, edge deburring tool (pictured below)  to chamfer both edges, and then a scotchbrite pad to smooth everything out.

Right elevator stiffeners and my edge deburring tool.

Here’s the picture of my primed skin.

It looks sloppy now, but wait until I get the vinyl off. Then the primed lines will look nice.

After the stiffener edge prep, the stiffeners got taken inside to be washed with dawn detergent.

Here are half of the stiffeners, being cleansed of their oily fingerprints and aluminum dust.

I decided to take a picture of how much detergent I use. Nothing really important, just camera-happy, I guess.

Dirty stiffeners need to be cleansed of their aluminum dust and fingerprints.

After cleaning, they go back outside for priming.

Boo-yeah, primed stiffeners.

While those were drying (and then flipped and sprayed on the other side), I placed rivets in the dimpled holes and taped them in place.

Rivets just asking to be beaten into submission.

I started to backrivet, and everything was going very smoothly.

Beautiful shop heads.

More beautiful shop heads.

God, I love backriveting.

But anyway, I got through all 116 rivets, then flipped everything over and saw these!

Ahh! Worst rivet ever!

This one is not so bad...

I figured out why this happened, and it falls squarely on me.

While I was dimpling, I didn’t pull the other half of the skin back well enough, so the skin side that was being dimpled was not sitting parallel to the faces of the dimple dies. One side of the die dented each of the last stiffener rivet holes on one side. The rivet in the second to last picture was flush against the backriveting plate, but the skin was dented, or above the backriveting plate.

I’m going to drill out all of the bad rivets on the trailing edge (of course, the worse of the bunch is on the top of the elevator, right where all of you are going to come look at my elevators), and then  try to smooth out the skin by backriveting it with a flush set from the inside out.

It might ruin the skins, which will be expensive. I’ll be sure to take some pictures of the process. Maybe it will save one of you some time and frustration…

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Posted by Andrew

Right Elevator Stiffener Drilling and Dimpling

April 14, 2010

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Another fairly boring night with right elevator stiffeners, but the end is near (end of right elevator stiffeners, not the whole airplane), so I’ll keep plugging away.

My setup for drilling stiffeners. I used the cordless today so I wasn't making too much noise. I'm almost done with this side.

I matchdrilled every hole except for the last hole (closest to the trailing edge.) Some of these last holes are both pre-punched, and just need to be matchdrilled to final size, and some are missing the holes in the stiffeners. You have to use the skin to matchdrill the stiffener.

Down the right elevator.

I unclecoed most of the stiffeners and then re-clecoed the stiffeners (just at the ends) with the elevator off of the table so I can roll it over to drill.

Ready to flip over and matchdrill those last stiffener holes.

One picture of the last hole.

The hole at the end of the "3" is the one I need to matchdrill.

After that, I used a thick sharpie to trace the stiffeners to help with future devinyling. Then, I flipped the whole thing over to start on the other side. Same process, though.

About halfway done with this side.

Then, uncleco from the table to flip over and get the last hole.

Unclecoing from the last hole.

No big deal for you, but I marked all of the stiffeners correctly. The right elevator in the background is sitting upside-down (I just typed right-side-up, and had to change it. See, I’m still confused). Anyway, the ones on the table are on the top surface of the elevator, but the one in the foreground is marked the top (“Top, A”), but is actually the longest bottom stiffener.

This should be "BA" for "Bottom, A."

After finishing all of the stiffener drilling, I took them inside to deburr. After all of the deburring, I grabbed this shot of the placemat on the kitchen table. (Don’t tell the girlfriend. I got it cleaned up.)

Aluminum shavings galore after deburring. This is kind of a stupid picture, but I already uploaded it, so I'm not going to hold back.

After deburring, I rubbed down the surface that needed to be dimpled, (not the perpendicular surface, and I definitely didn’t do any edge-finishing).

Deburred and scuffed, ready for dimpling.

And I would like to draw your attention to the following three dimples. Don’t they look lovely?

Looks like a professional dimpled these holes.

It was the girlfriend!

Girlfriend dimpling. (She kept giggling after each one. And after each time I said "dimple." There may or may not have been red wine involved.)

Anyway, she made it about 8 dimples before getting “bored” (I think her hands hurt, too). Back outside, I found this little guy.

he's pretty small, but looks kind of scary.

No real identifying marks, but I’m sure someone will be able to help out.

Anyone have any ideas?

As if I hadn’t had enough drama for the night, Ginger came out, grabbed some wood, and took it inside to chew up all over our staircase landing. Here are some of the remnants.

It's better than her eating the window sills. Or the banister. Or our patio chairs. Or my soul.

Anyway, I spent a few more minutes with the Permagrit block rounding the edges of the stiffeners. Next up, edge-finishing with the scotchbrite wheel, scuffing, cleaning, and priming. Then, same dance with the skin and the backriveting!

An hour and a half. Boom shakalaka.

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Posted by Andrew

Right Elevator Stiffeners and Priming

April 12, 2010

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Today was pretty boring. All I did was trim the aft end of right elevator’s stiffeners and prime the two spar reinforcement plates.

Here's half of my right elevator stiffeners.

Of course, I finished deburring, edge finishing, and cleaning the two right elevator spar reinforcements. I even got the girlfriend involved. She took the parts inside and scrubbed them down with dawn. Now it really is “our” airplane.

Two spar reinforcements, primed on one side.

While that one side was drying, I finished up with the stiffener trimming. Here’s a shot of my weapon of choice.

Stiffeners and snips.

After I finished my first 7 stiffeners, I laid them into the skin, just for kicks.

Stiffener work is boring, but it means that there is backriveting coming soon, and I love backriveting.

Drink of choice tonight (only during piddly stuff, never during “real” construction): Rum and Coke. Mmm. Rum.

Rum. Coke. Stiffeners. Sharpie. And a damn dirty workbench. (Those splotches are ski-wax drippings.)

Anyway, I think it was an hour tonight, including the 5 minutes of double duty with the girlfriend’s help. I’m gonna get her to help more.

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Posted by Andrew

EAA 1426 Fly-in Drive-in

April 10, 2010

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So I’m writing this almost a week later, but I’ll try to capture my experience last Saturday.

I woke up Friday afternoon set on having some contact with airplanes, so with a quick search of the EAA calendar, I had a fly-in-drive-in to attend. One of my buddies who owns a C182 was busy and said he wouldn’t make it, so it looked like I would be driving.

Here's 7am in NC looking around my garage corner. Not too bad, although the fence needs painting. Maybe next year.

A half an hour (and Chik-Fil-A biscuit) later, heading north on 77 toward Pilot Mountain.

Look closely at the vehicle in front of me. Crap, a State Trooper. no speeding today.

Another shot of pilot mountain.

Once in mountains, there are a couple nice vistas looking back toward the south and southeast.

77 looking south on the way up the mountains.

Once I pulled into  the airport (Twin County, HLX), I met a couple people standing on the ramp and up pulls a beige 182 with a 3-bladed prop. Wait a minute, my buddy Jon has a beige C182 with a 3-bladed prop.

That plane looks familiar.

I wonder who is going to get out.

It's Jon!

(Had to get a picture of him standing straight up.)

Anyway, while I’m a member at EAA 1114, their meeting isn’t until next weekend, and the EAA 1426 chapter fly-in promised pancakes. After some talking with Jon, we stumbled across this piece of machinery.

I’m going to try to capture the jokes about it. I take credit for none of them.

UFO (Unidentified Frying Object.)

So the joke goes that there was a retired Air Force officer who, as part of chapter 1426’s winter activity list, designed and constructed this beast to contend with some of the other pancake cookers out there.

Someone made a pretty funny joke about it being a disc-shaped metal object seen near the airport, and that it was a UFO (Unidentified Frying Object.) I actually spilled a little coffee out my nose at this.

Somebody then pointed out that it must be an advanced design project from the Air Force.

The the Air Force guy piped up and said…

"Nope, it's leaking oil. Must be from the Navy."

Much giggling ensued. No offense to the Navy, or any armed services branch.

Anyway, I got a couple action shots. The cooking surface is a 3/8″ aluminum disc (not aviation grade, the health department won’t approve that as a cooking surface because of some anti-corrosion additives or something). I was interested in that, but couldn’t find any more details. Anyway, th disc spins about 1 RPM, which, with 4 burners (note the manifold in the lower part of the next picture) at 90° from eachother, yields <counting>…18…19…20 pancakes every 3 minutes.

Two times around on the first side, then flip and one more time around.

Action shot! (That's a nice spatula, too.)

Look at how perfectly they are cooked.

Anyway,  I had to get a picture in front of it. Here I am, for only the second time in the blog. Sorry I didn’t comb my hair.

Who, other than me, would say, "Hey Jon, take a picture of me with the pancake cooker!"

Then, they showed me a partially completed RV-7 kit. They inherited it from someone, and are thinking about selling it. (I think they are more interested in completing it within the chapter, but they were interested me in at least taking a look.) If anyone reading this wants the contact info for them, let me know, I can put you in touch.

RV-7 horizontal and elevators.

An aquajet (ride for kids).

The wings.

More wing pictures.

Even more.

The vertical, rudder, flaps and ailerons.

These look like the older style wingtips to me.

Oops, forgot to rotate the picture.

Then we walked back to the main hangar, and I grabbed some pictures of the various projects there.

One of two helicopter projects in work.

This is "one of the first non-straight-tal 172s." Even though I used to work for Cessna (I was on the jet side of things), I can't remember what date that would have been early 60s?

I don't remember what I was trying to take a picture of here. Maybe the hangar doors and a 172...and half a ladder. Here are some hangar doors and a 172...and half a ladder!

Ooh, a King Air.

Looking back outside. The pancake cooker is in front of the helicopter being prepped for paint.

Here's the inside of that 172. No priming. No corrosion. Hmm.

A closeup of one of the helicopters.

Inside for breakfast, I got a picture of the sausage and egg chef and the EAA banner they hang up for meetings.

I'm hungry.

One of the very nice ladies there helping with breakfast came to Oshkosh in 2008 and got a picture in front of the Honda Aircraft Company’s HondaJet (HA-420). That’s our proof of concept aircraft.

A picture of a picture of the Model 420 HondaJet.

Then, Jon had to head out, so we grabbed a couple pictures in front of his plane.

We're bad at the whole lighting thing. Maybe we should try the back of the aircraft.

Much better. Jon told me it was okay for you guys to see his tail number. If you say so, Jon.

Then, I snapped some pictures of Jon’s departure.

Vroom.

Vroom.

Vroom.

Vroom.

Vroom.

Quiet vroom.

Then…I left, too. (How anti-climactic.)

On the way home.

That’s all. Now back to work on the airplane!

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Right Elevator Skeleton and Stiffeners

April 9, 2010

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Sorry for the tardiness on the commentary. Here it is.

I decided after riveting the trim reinforcement plate that I will stick with the right elevator for now. Of course, here is the obligatory plans picture.

On to the right elevator.

Instead of following the directions to start in on the stiffeners, I sorted through my lower workbench shelves and pulled out the parts for the right elevator skeleton. I just laid them on the (very dirty) workbench and grabbed this picture.

Right elevator skeleton, ready to rivet. Just kidding.

First up, prepare the two end ribs (edge finish, then flute).

Here they are (E-703 and E-704), sitting nice and flat with each other.

I can’t remember why I took this picture. Maybe after I removed the blue vinyl?

right elevator spar.

Then, it’s time to match-drill the two end ribs together.

The two end ribs clecoed together for match-drilling.

After that, they want you to cleco the two end ribs onto the rear spar. You can see some misalignment here.

See the spar flange hole and how it doesn't line up with the counterbalance rib?

Here's the other side, still not aligned very well.

After some manipulation via fluting and flange straightening, I managed to get everything lined up and match-drilled.

Here's my 12" bit, doing what it does best.

Here’s the outboard assembly after match-drilling.

Ready for disassembly.

Next, they want you to cleco in the counterbalance skin with the counterweight.

There's the right elevator counterweight.

I read on some other builders’ sites that it was difficult to cleco the counterbalance skin on the rib assembly. I didn’t have too much trouble, but it was definitely easier to work front to back.

Counterweight clecoed in.

Next (before going back to the counterweight for drilling), I clecoed on the inboard rib. These are matchrileld to #40, then dimpled and set with flush rivets on the front web of the spar. The reason? The elevator horn must sit flush on this surface. You’ll see later.

E-709 Root rib clecoed on.

Now back to the counterweight. Van’s wants you to matchdrill these to #12. I started with a #40 and worked my way up, blatantly ignoring the advice to use drill lubrication. Of course, I broke 3 bits before I subdued my own stubbornness and moved on to something else.

Broken bit, I need to get some Boelube.

I managed to get some locking needle-nose pliers around the bit and back it out slowly.

Anyway. I moved on to the skeleton.

Here's the skeleton clecoed together and match-drilled. You can see where the elevator horn will sit flush on the spar web necessitating the flush rivets between the spar and the root rib.

Then, I spent a little time inside on the stiffeners. I just rough cut them with snips to the general size.

These are for both elevators, some of these will be cut down further for the smaller required stiffeners between the trim spar and main spar on the left elevator.

2.0 hours today.

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