More match drilling and then disassembly of the elevator parts in prep for priming.
Category: Empennage
Building out the Empennage
Elevator – Part 2
I started to do my initial assembly of the Elevators. First thing was figuring out which way to bend the skins for the R and Left elevators. I ended up messing up my bend on the first one and decided just to use the Rivet gun to pound the skin flat and try again with some better wooden blocks. You can totally see that the skin isn’t perfect, but I have long since decided that this is not really going to be a “show plane”. I’ll most likely put some filler or micro to clean up the skin a bit prior to painting. No Biggie.
Also not sure if you can really catch it, but when I was attaching and match drilling the elevator horn, I had it rotated the wrong way. Again, not the end of the world, and I made sure that I had everything correct for final assembly.
Once again got some help from the girls while I was working and continued to make progress. So far, things are pretty straightforward based on past experience.
Elevator – Part 1
Beginning to assemble the elevators. The first few steps are cutting and cleaning up a number of the ribs and other small parts. I found my belt sander to be perfect for getting the separated rib parts down to the correct size. This did leave a bit of a burr that was then cleaned up on the ScotchBrite wheel. I assembled the ribs and match drilled them. I also cut and cleaned up the shear clips as well as assemble the Elevator tip rib assemblies.
Honestly this is what I consider the “fun stuff”. Take basic materials and cut, assemble, match drill, and begin to put the parts together.
Horizontal Stabilizer – Part 8
So not much detail for this post. Somehow I didn’t have my camera in “timelapse” mode, so I had to edit down a few hours of 4k video down to something “reasonable”. Again I was more concerned with making progress than I was on getting good camera angles. I was doing a bit better with my elevator videos that I should publish shortly.
Essentially this was a bunch of “rinse and repeat” riveting the ribs and spars to the skin. Nothing major. There is a note in the plans that some of the holes in the center of the HS may be more accessible when they are out of the cradles. I absolutely found this to be the case for my build (not shown in the video).
During this stage is when I really wanted an EAA counselor or another builder to come over and talk me off the ledge. I was getting upset that my skins weren’t “perfect” and that I was putting some dings in the skins. One of my local builders came over to take a look and didn’t see anything that was of any real concern. Even the dent in my rudder didn’t make him flinch. The advice was that I should try to use my mushroom swivel set (similar to this one). I have one sitting in my toolbox but hadn’t used it yet. I’ll have to see how it works on the elevators.
Anyway, here is the final Horizontal Stabilizer video.
Horizontal Stabilizer – Part 7
I’m trying to break some of my updates and videos up a bit so they aren’t so long (as well as speeding up the videos a bit).
I found some tips by Larry Larson on his website http://wirejockrv7a.blogspot.com/ Specifically his tips for Dimple tokens. I wanted to make sure I countersunk my spars correctly so I just make a few tokens to start with. They turned out pretty good and I need to finish making the set (as well as putting them on a keyring). I thought I took some video while I make the tokens, but can’t seem to locate it. (I’m really behind on my updates at the moment).
Countersunk all the necessary holes in both the front and rear spars (checking with the tokens along the way). Mounted the nose ribs and riveted them into place. I found that using one of the inspar ribs to pull the skin together helped a bit, but even still needed to cut a piece of vinyl tubing to help get the skin and rib flange to sit tight together. (This is hard to explain but is discussed in more detail in this tread on VAF, as well as photos here)
I installed the front spar and inspar ribs and blind riveted the ribs to the spar as appropriate. Finished up with clecoing the skins to the ribs before starting to rivet everything into place.