Stjohn's RV-7

8 hours.
Managed to get a dimpled skin and some ribs out of it.

Whole lot of building and not a lot of photography today. Drilled, disassembled, deburred, and dimpled right side HS today. I got to use my pneumatic squeezer. A lot. I clamped it in the vise for a little improv bench squeezer action. Ribs and spars ar a lot lighter than the squeezer, so this make things pretty easy.

I also dimpled the HS601PP skin using the squeezer freehand, but had to go to the C-Frame for the deep-reach stuff. I have to tell you, using that C-frame dimpler is a royal pain in the ass. The DRDT-2 is the way to go, or just welding up a big box-tube copy of it and finishing it in such a way that you can use the squeezer for the dimpler’s motive power. I have a design in my head, but I don’t need to go into it here since I can’t weld and I’m going to get all the mileage out of this Avery C-frame that I can. However, if you don’t position your workpiece correctly or you take your eye off it for the amount of time it takes to line up the hammer blow, your skin could jump off the dimple punch and put a hole somewhere in the vicinity of the one you actually want to dimple. Like so:

Well, that totally sucked. Not replace-the-skin sucked, though. The rivet is on the bottom side of the HS, and I did manage to drill it out to 1/8 and I’m hoping the rivet seats and covers up the slight elongation of the hole.
Eventually I got all the ribs and skin dimpled for the right HS. Deburring was not bad, just tedious, made even more so by this:

The black probelike thing is a Cogsdill Burraway, .093 size. The little silver sliver next to it is the blade. The idea behind this tool is you put it in a drill motor and run it through the hole you want to deburr. The little blade sticks out to the side of the shaft and deburrs the hole in one pass, outside on the way in, inside on the way out. In theory. Problem is, the .093 is just a wee bit too small to be effective on #40 holes, especially ones that are a little on the big side. This led me to try to adjust the blade tension. I subsequently broke it. So now, I have to find a frigging watchmaker to replace this blade. This tool is so small, it’s impossible to modify with the stuff I have. This pic was shot through my magnifying-glass desk lamp out on the workbench. However, the 1/8 size Burraway is great. Go Cogsdill! What I need to do now is get online to MSC and order a new retaining pin, and a bigger blade, if they have it. This little bastard was $55 bucks, so I’d hate to think it’s useless. Tomorrow we make sure all the edges are done (sometimes I miss things) and move on to the Left side HS.