I Hate Dimpling Stiffeners

August 24, 2011

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Well, can you guess what the airplane-building activity was? Maybe from the title?

Yup, you guessed right. Deburring and Dimpling stiffeners.

Here are the tools of the trade. An oversize drill bit, spun in the fingers to deburr. And, my normal dimple dies in my economy squeezer.

After one stiffener...

After 32 stiffeners.

For some excitment tonight (since otherwise, it would be a little lacking), let’s break out the calculator.

2 ailerons, 2 sides per aileron = 4 aileron sides.

4 aileron sides, 8 stiffeners per side = 32 stiffeners.

32 stiffeners, 7 holes per stiffener = 224 holes dimpled.

224 holes dimpled, 2 sides per hole = 448 deburred hole sides

448 deburred hole sides, 2 spins per hole = 896 spins of the drill bit.

My thumb and fore-finger hurt.

0.5 hour.

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I Hate Drilling Stiffeners

August 15, 2011

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I’m still trying to nail down a good time for continued wing skin riveting, so in the mean time, more ailerons.

But first, a little taste of how I like to walk the dogs. Or rather, how they walk me.

In the same vein as last night, I’m not really a big fan of drilling stiffeners. Maybe it’s because I’ve done it on the rudder and both elevators, but it’s just kind of boring.

You can tell it’s boring by my lame pictures tonight.

After drilling some stiffeners, a boring picture.

Halfway through the 32 total stiffeners, one of my #40 drill bits broke. Boring picture.

I labelled each stiffener with the aileron (right or left), side (upper or lower), and then 1 through 8 from inboard to outboard.

After about 45 minutes of that, I decided a nice small (15 minute) task would be to knock out the edge finishing.

Did anything assist me in that decision? Yes.

A pretty bad cut on my knuckle from dragging it across a skin edge. Ouch. (So far, this project has cost some blood and sweat. I’m sure the tears are on there way…)

All the edges edge-finished, and some nice round corners.

Here are both aileron skins and the four piles of stiffeners, all matchdrilled.

I may be done with drilling stiffeners. Who knows.

1.0 Hours. I bet tomorrow’s post is called “I Hate Deburring and Dimpling Stiffeners.”

(Actually I don’t hate deburring and dimpling stiffeners. I can do it inside, where the A/C is nice and chilly.)

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I Hate Making Stiffeners

August 14, 2011

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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.

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Started on the Ailerons

August 13, 2011

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Well, Joe and I haven’t been able to find a good time to come over and get the last of the wing rivets done, so for tonight, I’m going to move on to something else. Even though I could go back and continue working on the left wing, I think instead I’m going to start on the ailerons and flaps. Instead of just the right aileron and right flap, though, I’ll just go ahead and build both sets.

First, the ailerons. Here’s a plans change picture, for your amusement.

The ailerons!

First up, let’s start collecting some parts. Here are the aileron spars.

One withe blue plastic, and one after I'd removed it.

Then, I gathered up some nose ribs, the hinge brackets, and the spar reinforcement plates.

Aileron parts.

Following the directions (although I’ve skipped the stiffener-fabricating part), I lined the edges of the reinforcement plates up with the ends of the spars, and centered them vertically. They seemed to go only one way (they’re a little rectangular).

(Does that sound a little ominous? Keep reading.)

After some matchdrilling, I stepped back for another picture.

All four reinforcement plates drilled.

Then you stick the hinge brackets on, and drill up to a #12 for some AN3- bolts.

Looking good. Everything's aligned.

Then, I took everything apart, and noticed that my edge distance was not so great. After rechecking the orientation of the plates, I realized that I had initially lined them up correctly, just to assume that they were the wrong way (it didn’t look like they would fit). I flipped them 90° and drilled.

I found an awesome online tool to do this for me. Hilarious, right?

I held them up the correct way, and sure enough, there’s room. Bummer.

Just so I could end on a high note, I found the aileron ribs, and pulled the blue plastic off.

Some aileron ribs.

I clecoed them to the spar, along with the nose ribs, so that I could see something that kind of resembled ailerons.

Yup, these look like ailerons.

1.0 hour.

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Posted by Andrew

More Right Top Skin Riveting Prep

August 11, 2011

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Not much tonight. I put rivets in the remaining top skin holes and did some better inspection of the rivets we set a few days ago. All the rivets look great, but I’m less than perfectly content with some of my edges. The tank-top-skin seam has a really tiny step to it. I rolled the edge a little, but I probably could have gone a little more with it. Also, my very nice scarf joint turned out to not be perfectly flush either. It’s not anything I’m going to change, I’m just going to have to accept that I’m not going to win any awards.

Anyway, I put the rivets in and put a piece of tape over each one.

Rivets and tape.

Rivets and tape and rivets and tape and rivets and tape.

After 45 minutes of that, I grabbed my right outboard aileron bracket and decided to tackle the bad rivet and small gap.

Here’s the bad rivet. The shop head just barely started to split.

Yikes.

It also cause the part to separate a little.

This is not acceptable.

After drilling out the two closest rivets…

Whoa. That's weird.

Anyway, I got a small clamp out….

Better.

And re-set those two rivets.

Shop heads look much better, and now there is no gap

Since I had scuffed up the parts a little while riveting, I shot a little more primer on everything.

The blue tape is there to protect the bearing. Didn't want any paint on them.

1.0 hour today…pretty boring. Drilled two rivets out, but now I’m ready for Joe to come over and knock this wing out.

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Riveted Some of Right Wing Top Skins

August 10, 2011

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Well. I managed to get Joe over to the house again, this time over a long lunch break.

This is a horrible picture, but you can sort of see that we got about half of the right wing’s top skins riveted.

We moved the tape off the rivet heads to air in inspection, but I'm going to reuse them later when I put the rest of the rivets in.

We’ve got my rivet gun (4x) set to about 32 psi (really hard to tell) and Joe’s getting good at pulling the trigger to get about 8 hits. Sometimes 7, sometimes 9. About once every 20 rivets, we’ll need to add a few hits, and once in another 20 rivets, it’ll be about 2 hits too much. Slightly flat, but within milspec, and not worth drilling out and making it worse.

It was an hour’s worth of work, but there were two of us, so I’m going to start counting it as man-hours instead of just my hours.

In the next few days, I need to put rivets in all the remaining holes and get tape over them. Hopefully just one more hour until I have the right top skins completely on!

2.0 man hours. 173 rivets (I counted three times), and none needed to be drilled out (Nice job, Joe!).

(I’m going to go back and change the other post to include Joe’s hours.)

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Riveted Aileron Brackets

August 8, 2011

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Before I get into all the airplane-building stuff tonight, I have to show you the storm that passed by yesterday. The girlfriend grabbed the camera and grabbed this shot.

This is looking south. Really pretty tail end of the storm, all pink and such. And the moon!

Okay, enough pretty stuff.

While waiting for a good time to rivet on the right wing’s top skins, I decided to move on to something else. I guess the aileron brackets will do. After looking at the plans for a few minutes, I started pulling out parts.

Those counterbores are where the bearings will be sandwiched in between two halves.

Mocked up with some #30 clecos, ready for matchdrilling.

Two on the left wing, two for the right.

After matchdrilling and edge finishing, I reassembled them and started figuring out where these things get countersunk.

One note here. Based on many other builders’ experiences, I’ll have to come back after fabricating these and rouding off the top forward corners. They apparently don’t fit very well, and without any access to the appropriate spots on the rear spar (okay, I’m just lazy), I’m going to wait to fit check them until later.

Ready for countersinking.

Having watched a few other builders mess this up, I broke out the sharpie and decided I was going to be darn sure of my countersinks before starting.

If you read closely, you can see that it says flush head on the... (crap, I can't read that closely here.) It's the outboard side, I promise.

Mirrored for the other side.

There is actually a page for the mirrored part, forgot to flip the page.

For the two inboard brackets, there are the same outboard countersinks, then two more on the inboard side. (Sharpie circled above.)

I retrieved my rivet container and pulled out my very first An426AD4 rivet.

It's way bigger.

A little countersinking, and…

Tada!!!

Then I pulled everything apart (I realize this description is a little terse…there is cheese and wine waiting for me in the next room), and got to prepping for primer.

After going inside to clean and dry, these are ready for primer.

While the primer is drying, I pulled out the hardware.

Man, this bag looks old. It's only from last summer.

A picture of paint drying.

Finally, I set some rivets. 7 in each bracket, to be more precise.

See the rightmost bracket? The aft edge of the piece isn’t quite flush, and Van’s is very specific that it must be. Also, one of those rivets didn’t really set quite right, so tomorrow, I’m going to go ahead and replace it.

All looking good except the right-most one.

2.0 hours. 7 rivets in each bracket, for a total of 28 rivets.

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Posted by Andrew

A Few Things Before More Top Skin Riveting

August 6, 2011

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Well, I think Joe might be coming over tomorrow or early next week, so I figured I’d do a few things while I wait for his rivet-shooting expertise.

One of the things that slowed us down a little bit last time was putting the rivets in the holes and putting a piece of tape over each rivet head.

I know I’m not following the standard pattern, so don’t do what I do when you get to this step.

It took about 45 minutes, but now I have all the plans-reading, rivet-legend confusion out of the way.

I'm going to be so excited when these top skins are done.

Looking for something else I could do, I grabbed some snap bushings and started putting them in all of the holes I’d drilled earlier. (Dear girlfriend, I know it is about 200°F outside right now, but MY beautiful picture of YOUR beautiful chili from that post is making me miss football season.)

A few snap bushings and the bags they came in.

While I’m doing that, I might as well feed this conduit in the 3/4″ hole in the ribs.

A piece of Van's conduit cut to length.

I probably could have gotten some from Lowe’s or something, but this stuff fit these 3/4″ holes perfectly.

I was smart enough to start in the middle and work toward the inboard and outboard ribs.

Tada!

Here’s a closeup of both the snap bushings and the conduit. had to use the flash so you could see under there.

Ready for wiring anyone?

Of course, I didn’t tell you that I had to uncleco the lower outboard skin, so my last trick for the evening was to re-cleco it. I could have waiting until during our riveting session tomorrow so I didn’t have to go off and on again with the skin, but I’d rather waste my time than Joe’s.

Ready for riveting.

1.5 fairly boring hours.

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Riveted Right Wing Top Skin Wingwalk Area

August 4, 2011

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I think we need a little non-airplane excitement in our lives. Let’s start with a little movie.

I never get tired of letting them howl at those sirens. Ginger does a pretty good job of matching the pitch. Jack’s just going NUTS.

Okay, back to building.

Well, I finally conned someone from work to come over and help me rivet some top skins. We’ll call this person Joe to protect the innocent.

Joe was eager to learn about the RV-7, so after a very quick tour of the shop, we got to work.

First thing, we pulled out my old practice kit, and we looked at some of my riveting, showing him where some where okay, some were perfect, and some were horrible.

After that, we got the rivet gun out, turned it on low, and I let him hold it against the bucking bar to get a feel for the feathering trigger, what it feels like to hold, etc. After a few minutes, we put some AN426AD3-4 rivets in the trailing edge of the practice kit, and practiced our shooter-bucker teamwork. After 3 or 4 rivets, we had the air pressure dialed in to something comfortable, and it clicked for Joe. 5 perfectly shot flush rivets.

Our practice setup.

Well then, let’s get started.

Note: I am totally ignoring the “start in the center rib of each skin” advise from Van’s. It supposedly works out to the tightest possible skin, but I don’t understand how anything will move around after precisely drilled these holes and dimpled (and 50% clecoed). I don’t know. Maybe I’ll end up with the world’s wrinkliest skin. Who knows.

Anyway, we stuck rivets into every other hole (remember, I’m crazy and 50% clecoed this beast) and got to working. We had a good “ready…go” system down, and we got a few good rivets in.

Joe's first rivet. Perfect.

The very next rivet? Not so good. I let the bucking bar slip off the shop head, and the rivet gun left the tiniest hint of a ding. Lucky for us, we decided to start in the middle of the wing walk rib, so any dings (polish or paint) would be under the wing walk nonstick strip. We are so smart.

Not two minutes after I explained that it’s a rite of passage to knock over the rivet container, and not to worry about it.

I look under the wing skin and what to I see?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry, Joe. We’re laughing WITH you. I promise.

Okay, we got the 3 remaining wing-walk ribs 50% done…

Halfway done.

Look at these perfect shop heads!

Then pulled out the remaining clecos, put rivets in the empty holes, covered each head with tape, and shot the remaining rivets.

On the inboardmost trailing edge rivets, I totally butchered a shop head trying to use my tungsten bucking bar which slipped off the head. Luckily, the skin wasn’t dinged, but we had to drill out the rivet and reset it. It went great, and I finally got to use the $10 Harbor Freight Body Repair Kit I bought a year ago.

This bar worked perfectly.

Some more riveting… and we finished the wingwalk area.

This looks so sweet in person.

I can’t believe that some day I’m going to be standing on that. (I can’t believe someday some of you loyal readers will be standing on that!)

Only two mistakes tonight, and both of them were my fault. Joe 2, Andrew 0. Boo.

1.5 hours (I’m NOT going to count it as 3.0 man-hours). 72 rivets, only one of the drilled out. Thanks, Joe!

10AUG2011 UPDATE: I am going to count Joe’s hours. I’m changing the log to count it as 3.0.

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Posted by Andrew

Started Riveting Right Top Skins

August 2, 2011

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So last night, I forgot to tell you about deburring and dimpling the rest of the ribs before clecoing the skins on. I don’t know why I forgot, or think it’s important, but I did.

Okay, tonight, I headed out to the garage after bedtime because I am too excited to get going on these top skins.

What can I do quietly? Maybe squeeze some of the more accessible rivets.

Here's the guide for wing skin riveting.

And the legend…

It's basically like paint by numbers, but for nerdy pilots.

So, I broke out the squeezer, sat down with some music, some rivets (of various sizes per above) and my cleco pliers and started in on it.

Here’s the first top skin rivet.

First top skin rivet!

The first three! (I'm such a dork.)

It turns out you can reach the bottom (rear spar) to skin rivets, and the inboard edge. I needed a closer look at the inboard edge part to make sure I didn’t rivet any of the holes that are supposed to be left open for the wing root.

DON'T RIVET THESES HOLES!

A gratuitous shop head picture.

Nice, Nice, Nice, Nice, Nice, Nice, Nice.

After 140 squeezes (I lie, some of them were underdriven, so I squeezed them a little more), I had the whole rear spar (except a few) and the whole inboard edge (except a few).

In case you don't like this picture...

I took this one too.

I don’t know why I took both those pictures. The only two differences…I put the rear spar support back up (for kicks) and didn’t bend down as far for the picture. I think I’m tired.

I’m wrangling up my first riveting partner for some more skin riveting this weekend.

1.0 hour. 140 perfectly squeezed rivets. Boo. Yeah.

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