Stjohn's RV-7

1 hour.
This went surprisingly quickly. The full-scale drawing of the F-703B angle was a big help. I was able to mark off the notches by laying the angle down on the drawing and marking everything. Of course, you should check, because there’s another ‘full scale’ part on that same drawing that’s 1/2″ longer than the stated dimensions.
The panel reinforcing angle is made out of .063 , and it stiffens the panel. Notches need to be cut into it along the length so it can bend around the curved edge of the panel. I haven’t deburred it yet, that’s another fun adventure waiting for me.

1.5 hours.
Picked up where I left off this morning and finished making and drilling the side seal support angles. That’s it! woohoo!
Not sure why that took so long. Oh, I know. It’s all the deburring of the notches.

1.5 hours.
Fabricated and drilled the center seal reinforcement angle. This goes on the center subpaneln and helps seal… Something. This is the first time in the kit where I’ve had to learn the technique of notching aluminum angle to bend around curved shapes. Not that big a deal, really, but it’s a good part of the subpanel work. Basically, you make some holes in the angle near the edge, then cut notches tangent to the hole edges, giving you a rounded notch. This allows you to bend the angle around a curve, which needs to happen on the subpanel, and later, the panel. It’s pretty cool, but it makes for a lot of deburring work. I got the center one done, and cut the length of one of the side ones, and I’ll try to finish those tonight after work, although I’ve just been informed I’m putting up shelves.

4 hours.
Finished the roll bar! Booya! I drilled the roll bar to the F-631D angle, after all that measuring from last time. A couple of goofs, but not too bad. First was that I trimmed the radius for the angle bracket a little high. I had to abandon the lower hole in the F774 skin ear where it attaches the skin to the angle bracket, because the 1/8 hole didn’t have the edge distance required. I had to do this on both sides, actually. Kinda bummed me out, but a little filler and you’ll never notice. The other thing I did was drill out the lower forward hole on the right to #19 instead of tapping it to 8-32. Duh. So I’m going to put an AN-509-10R10 bolt through there and lock it down with a stop nut. Everything else is fine. I got my edge distance for the 8-32 screws and the 10-32 screws on the aft section of the roll bar. I also didn’t have to remove much metal to follow the curve of the longeron where the skin lays against the angle bracket.
This is the left bracket bolted in.

And this is the right one. Not that you can tell with me shaking the camera like I’ve got a jackhammer in the other hand.

This is where things got a little odd. The cutout for the roll bar is a little high. Not terribly. And yes, these corners are radiused.

After getting everything drilled in and bolted up, it was time to finally install that support channel thing, and I can’t remember the number of it right now. This gets drilled to an angle on the back of the roll bar, and it connects to the next aft bulkhead. The back half of the canopy plexi goes over this. Others have put baggage compartment lights, in this part, but my interior lighting is going to consist of what’s necessary to see the controls and instruments, and not much else. I think a LED flashlight velcroed under the armrest would make a fine baggage compartment light. I don’t want to wire anything I don’t have to.

This shot just shows the AN3 bolts on the inboard left holding the roll bar to the angle brackets. Oh yeah, I had to trim away a smidge of the seat back stop for the angle bracket to sit flush.

After that, I went on a mad cleaning spree. I rounded up all the loose hardware that had fallen on the floor or in the belly of the plane and returned all the tools to their proper places. I vacuumed 2 weeks’ worth of metal chips off the floor and a load of aluminum dust off the grinder/saw bench. Then I vacuumed out the plane,
Clean shop:

Clean ship:

After that, I tied up some loose ends. The forward-most bulkhead in the tailcone comes from QB-land with pop-rivets installed in the joint between the two bulkhead halves. I guess this is for better skin fit or whatever. Plus, the plans tell you to leave the bottom hole open if you’re building a sliding canopy. Well, I’m not building a slider. So I was able to get those done.

The other thing I got done today was something I should have taken care of when I put the control column together, but for some reason, I blew it off. I drilled the hole in the control column for the right-side stick. There’s a bolt through there, but it’s not going anywhere without horking on it with something that’ll chip the powder coat, and besides, I don’t see the point of taking the right side stick out anyhow. Maybe if shelley decides she doesn’t want the thing in her lap while she knits on long XC flights, then I’ll revisit it, but for now it’s there.

The last loose end I took care of was the rest of my finish kit inventory. I still have to do all the little bags, but I got everything checked off the list. This is most of my finish kit, occupying the guest house bedroom.

1.5 hours.
Not sure what to call that thing. Cabin frame, roll bar, dunno. That upside-down U-shaped thingy that keeps your head from snapping off in a rollover. I made the cuts for the radii of the F-631D angles and got everything lined up for drilling. This was one of those things I needed to get absolutely right, so I spent a good long time measuring, double checking, measuring, clamping, and finally marking where the angles will go. I sort of used Mike Bullock’s method, where I clamp the roll bar to a straightedge clamped to match the angle of the front of the skin ears. Mine was a little different, in that I kept the roll bar on the whole time instead of using pieces of equivalent thickness, then marked the outline of where the angles lay. This will get me where I need to be for drilling, although i might try the other way when I get home, since I haven’t committed to any holes yet.

1.5 hours.
stuck the F-631D angle brackets together and started getting them lined up on the fuselage. Van’s says the roll bar is supposed to go 56 13/16 back from the ‘fuselage station’ which in this case, means the SS firewall. Well, that’s nice and everything, but my ship is a quickbuild, and where the holes on the F-774 skin line up to the roll bar and have good edge distance is about 57″ and small change. This gets the F-631D brackets into the big angles under the baggage deck bulkhead with enough clearance for the nuts that hold down the brackets, roll bar, etc. What was a very pleasant occurence is the way the roll bar itself all came out. For a quick and dirty test fit, I clamped the angle brackets down with the outer bracket at the edge of the longeron, right where it’s supposed to go. The roll bar goes on these without much trouble, but I can see having to stretch it just a hair to pull it into line. Next thing is going to be drilling the brackets to the bulkhead, then drilling the roll bar to the brackets, using the foremost aft top skin as a drill guide and lineup tool. Yarr.
Stay tuned for the attaching of the roll bar.

4 hours.
Combination entry for today and yesterday. Got the roll bar channels all riveted up. This involved some priming, again a lovely shade of Colonial Marine drab.
Here are the major parts, drying in the sun. For those of you in the cold crappy states like the one I’m from, it was 74 degrees F, sunny, and calm. Perfect paint weather. I’m not as anal about priming as I used to be, but since this stuff is pretty well inaccessible once it’s riveted together, a light coat of primer might help, especially since I live right near the coast, where the salty marine layer infiltrates everything.

With the channels clamped back to the board for flatness, I riveted the upper strap of the forward channels. They have you do the forward channels with AN-426 solid flush rivets, since you can get at them with a squeezer.

The next part of the process is obvious; you rivet on all the stuff you can with the channels apart, like the attach angle. This is the aft side now, and at this point, I’ve blind-riveted in betwen those sections of clecoes.

When you’re done, you get this. Forward part is all flush AN rivets, aft is CS4-4 blind rivets.

Here’s the result, resting in place. The next part of the op is going to be fitting the attach angles, then drilling/bolting them to the fuselage.

As far as I can tell, the dimensions look good. The angle brackets at the bottom of the roll bar plus the roll bar make up the width of the fuselage at that point. I think I might still have to shave a few thousanths off to match the contour of the longeron, and to keep the skin sitting flush, but it looks good so far.

1 hour
This morning, I countersunk the F-631A channels. No pics, since this isn’t a very interesting thing, but the process was pretty cool. I set everything up assembly-line style, by putting the countersink cage in the floor-standing drill press and building a fence with a pilot hole out of wood. I gave each hole a swipe with the Boelube stick and was able to knock out all 4 channels. Now I get to deburr the insides of the channels, prime them, and rivet them together. Then I have to figure out the whole attachment to the fuselage. That, friends and neighbors, is going to be interesting.
At some point, I WILL be able to paint the interior, but it looks like Terminator 4 is about to start stealing my weekends from me, so I might slow down on the plane for a bit, but not before I get the roll bar done.

1.5 hours
Not much cabin frame work. Mostly what I did was make the guest house bedroom ready for the influx of finish kit parts. Mike from Partain Transport dropped off the finish kit crate and we got it into the driveway, after a little game of aircraft Tetris in the trailer. My kit was buried under 3 RV-12 subkits and a partially completed RV8 which was on its way to Colorado along with a Super Cub wing. Tomorrow, Dave and I will pop the lid off the crate and put all the bits in the garage or the guest house. The crate itself will become part of a home improvemnent project I’ve been putting off for a long time.
What I actually got done on the cabin frame was to un-cleco the assembly, drill the aft attach bracket and deburr the upper and lower strips. Tomorrow I’ll set up some genius way to countersink the F-631A channels. Then if time permits, I’ll scrub them, rough them, and prime them.

4 hours.
Today was all about the roll bar. Last time, I had the F-631A channels clamped to the plywood, ready for drilling, and I got the F-631C plate drilled to the aft section. Mostly it was about measuring. Measuring to make sure there was edge distance on the channel as well as on the strip of .063 that holds the whole kaboodle together. This was a pretty timeiintensive process. The sequence is thus: Measure the line along which the holes go, mark where the holes go, clamp, drill, cleco. Dig:
Here’s the channels jigged up on the plywood. Remember, we measured this apparatus so that it, and the attach brackets are exactly as wide as the fuselage. At this point, the channels have been marked for drilling.

To mark the channels for the proper edge distance and hole spacing, I bagged a strip of .016 (or whatever the really thin stuff is) and marked out holes with the rivet fan, evenly spaced, a little less than an inch and a half, per plans. It flexed enough to fit the curve of the channels so I could mark off the hole spacing without having to measue each one. That would have been tedious in the extreme. I love the rivet fan.

At this point, I’ve just gotten to the curvature of the channel. This is where the inner strip really wants to pull away, so I’ve got c-clamps holding it tightly against the channel while I drill. I’m using the 90 degree angle drill for this, because it rocks for this kind of stuff.

Bottom aft channel is drilled and clecoed. I repeated the process with the upper strip. This let me fit the forward (top in this case) channels to the previously drilled strip. Then I clamped, drilled and clecoed. Easier than the aft channels, because this time the inner strips are held in place and in the correct shape already.

Of course, it helps if the assemblage is clamped flat to the workspace, so that’s what I did. At this point I’m just finishing the upper left quarter.

Once it’s done, it’s a surprisingly rigid structure, which is only going to become more so when riveted. The plans have you do solid rivets on the forward section and blind rivets on the aft. I can see why you have to use blind rivets on one part of it, you can’t reach in there to squeeze or buck with all channels in place. Not unless you’re a liquid metal T-1000, but if you were, you’d be hunting down an annoying kid who’s supposed to save the future instead of building an RV-7. Anyway, here is the roll bar, wearing pretty much my full complement of 1/8″ clecoes.

Tomorrow, while the girls are eating fondue and swooning at the Oscars (Dark Knight should have got the nom, Benjamin Button blows), I will be out in the shop countersinking each and every one of those holes for flush rivets.