4 hours.
Got the two skins of the left elevator riveted together in preparation for the big tuck. The riblet went in just fine, and I managed to get all but 3 of the aft spar done with AN426 rivets, instead of the blind rivets it calls for. If the elevator tabs had still been there, I would have had to use blind rivets on all of them. Just a quick shout out to Brown Tool: the C-Rex yoke is awesome. It’s a 4-1/2″ c-yoke with a tapering nose that accepts sets and dies. There really isn’t much on the empennage you can’t reach with this thing. It’s really friggin’ heavy though, and it tends to aggravate any work-induced RSI’s, but I dig it.
Oh, and a confession: When I got the stuff all riveted together, I realized that i’d put the control horns on backwards. Right was left and left was right. For the first time in a long while, I felt like it was time to toss the whole assembly into the street. All I could visualize was Gunnery Sgt Hartman after Pvt Pyle borks a shoulder-arms order in “Full Metal Jacket.”
Slap. “What side of your head was that, Private Pyle!” Slap. “What about that?”
So I had to peel back the skin from a corner of the right elevator and drill out the control horn, then drill out the left one and switch them. Fortunately, and this is pretty much all my airplane karma for the week, they went into their proper places extremely well and I was back to where I should have been in less than half an hour.
Left Elevator Skeleton/skin
Rt. Elevator skin riveted on
1 hour
Sneaked (‘snuck’ is not a word) off home to rivet for a bit. Got the right elevator skin riveted up to the skeleton. All that’s left is to roll the leading edges and blind-rivet them together. At some point I’ll have to visit the land of fiberglass, but I want to do all that at once. If you haven’t caught it before, I’m really not a fan of paint, grease, glue, and other liquid/semisolid compounds involved in construction. But good fiberglass skills are an excellent asset, so I just need to buy the gloves, suck it up, and get it done. I still have to put the glass caps on the VS and HS, and I still need to build Rudder 2.0 and wire the strobe into the glass cap for that.
Right Elevator skin riveting
.75 hours
Did some riveting before work this morning. Shattered the dawn stillness with the air compressor, but I got all the E-713 rivets in forward of the spar. I was also able to get the skin on without using any blind rivets, using the method described in the construction manual, which is to rivet E-713 and E-702 together where they overlap inside of the spar and rib, then scooch the skeleton inside the joined skins. So far, it’s turning out well. No smiles and I can’t get a fingernail between the joined pieces near a rivet. I’ll probably go home at lunch and do some as well.
Oh, and fairly minor duh: The mounting brackets for the trim tab servo that I thought I’d lost or didn’t get with the emp kit turned up. They turned up after I’d ordered new ones from Van’s, hiding in a plastic organizer in a cell marked suspiciously: TRIM TAB HARDWARE. I’m going to get the right elevator done and out of my face, then I’ll finish up the left elevator.
Feels good to actually build.
1.5 hrs
Riveted the right elevator skeleton together this morning.
Elevator control horn on, smooth as silk, no whammies.
This is the part that caused the elevator rebuild in the first place. To do this, bend the tab of the inner end rib out a ways so you can get the squeezer in on the rivets that go through the spar. Put the outer rib on after you bend the rib back into shape. I hope the skin still fits.
The whole deal, ready to get the skin put on. Yeah, the shop heads are on the wrong side on one of the reinforcing plates (except for the platenut), but it’ll be fine. Shop heads are a good size and perfectly round.
next is tha skin, baby!
The List.
Sean moving out of the guest house avails me of two things. One is a place to live while we remodel our bedroom and have new windows put in. The second is a place to build an airplane. So here’s what has to be done to make it work. I’ll post photos of the guest house soon, but for now, bear with me.. It’s about a 500 sq/ft structure with a small attic, main room with vaulted ceilings and a small bedroom. The bedroom has been allocated as a true guest bedroom and our bedroom while we remodel and can’t use our master bedroom. It’s also a chillout space. The main room is party zone and aircraft factory. It’ll be a party zone until June when the kit shows up. Anyway here’s what has to be done before this can work.
1. Remove/relocate stove and fridge.
2. Remove cabinets.
3. Remove vinyl flooring in kitchenette and bathroom.
4. Remove carpeting throughout.
5. Remove baseboards throughout.
6. Tile (or concrete stain) bedroom and bathroom.
7. Concrete stain/floor seal main room.
8. Paint main room.
9. Install work lights in main room.
10. Build wing cradle.
11. Build fuselage stands.
12. Install shelving for parts.
13. Prepare attic for storage.
14. Finish Empennage (!!!!!!!)
16. Shrinkwrap and store finished empennage parts.
17. Upgrade electrical. 220v and an extra 30-40 amps.
Going to be a busy, busy May.
Primed elevator parts
1.5 hours
Primed all the elevator skeleton bits. I hate priming, but it was good to get it done. I just hate the ratio. The actual act of priming is about 15% of it. The rest is setup, letting it dry, then cleanup. Bleh.
Choose! (2 hours)
Choose deburred elevator edges, choose dimples, choose nutplates attached to trim tab reinforcing plate, choose trim tab access cover drilled and deburred, choose the trim tab reinforcing plate riveted to the elevator skin.
Choose something else to break up the monotony besides ripping off ‘Trainspotting’ for a blog post. But this blog post is significant because this week i got a letter from Van’s announcing the commencement of my QB construction. Delivery date is expected to be June-ish. So I need to call Tony Partain to make shipping arrangements, then make a hole for the kit parts, build the wing cradles (yes, i’m making two so they can flatten against the wall), build the fuselage rotisserie, and of course, finish the empennage. I still don’t know what engine I want, so I haven’t ordered it yet, but I’m thinking about installing the Sam James cowl and plenum. 7-10 hp for around 2 grand? I’ll take it. Beats 8 grand for 20 more ponies.
Come to think of it, the IO360-A1B6D with 3-blade constant speed prop of my dreams has been knocked down a few pegs to a vertical induction IO360 parallel valve constant speed kit engine, most likely an ECI IOX variant. I need to find a builder, although a friend of mine is an A/P and maybe giving him a couple of grand to help me stick a kit together would be the way to go. The bad part of that is, I have no facilities to test run it, and no way am I going to wind up like this poor bastard.
Fun and games aside, there is a lot to be done before the kit gets here, but it’s good to have activities. Keeps me off the streets.
Blam
Pulled the trigger. Sent the check and order form for the QB kit. Getting float-fuel senders, electric aileron trim, and dual brakes.
What have I done?
Time to pull the trigger?
From the last entry, and the long space between entries since the test entry, that it’s been a while since I’ve done anything on the plane. For a long time, there were no weekends. For a long time before that, there were 1-day weekends where the running of the house took all the energy. And the occasional need to have a social life, but even that was rare. No time, no plane. Simple as that.
The plus side of this sad tale is that I get paid hourly. Lots and lots and lots of overtime. And no time to spend it. So after a year of saving and investing (thanks for that iPhone, Apple), I’ve got enough to do a couple of things: 1: Order the quickbuild kit. 2: take enough time off to put in a significant amount of time on it. Oh, and our tenant is moving out of the guest house this Saturday. That means I have a place to put the fuselage. Farming gear goes in the storage portion, wings go in the newly liberated garage. Bedroom stays a bedroom for guests.
So.. Do I order the kit?
dimpled right elevator
.5 hours
Another foray into visual effects gave me a nice present of 8 weeks of 7-day workweeks on Spider Man 3, something I was promised we would never have. No family-friendly terms come to mind for what I feel like about that. None at all. But before that it was 10-12 hour days, six days a week, since about October, and several weekends were spent landscaping the yard. Shelley’s on hell time too, working on Pirates of the Caribbean 3 at Digital Domain, so there were a lot of grumpy, sit-and-watch-tv, or go-right-to-bed-after-work days. She’s still doing it, but I’m done. This might turn out to be one of those 10-year quickbuild RV’s.
Saturday, after finally cleaning up the garage a little and getting all the landscape materials and tools out of the way of my workspace, I fitted the nice new 4″ yoke on the squeezer and dimpled the right elevator skin. Although this took only five minutes or so, I spent a good amount of time staring at all the parts, trying to remember what goes where, where I was when I last downed tools, what I didn’t have that I needed, what I have now that I didn’t then, and just generally got my space back. It was at that point that I realized, I don’t have a 1-car garage. I have about half a 1-car garage. The other half is laundry machinery, hot water plumbing, and various garden-care implements.