These are pics from the process of closing the HS. All this happened in mid november 2005.
Here, we’ve closed up the skin. Fitting the middle ribs was a real ratbastard of a chore, but as soon as the zen took over, it became considerably less so. This pic is of the rear spar assembly clecoed and somewhat riveted to the rest of the HS.
Shop heads all looking good, gauged at the proper width and thickness. Used the 4″ thin-nose yoke on these.
Left side ready to rock.
Lined up, looking good, no gaps between the skin and spar, even with just clecoes on there.
An overview. By the way… You see that lamp? I hate it. I want it to be crushed to singularity in a massive black hole. The only thing making it useful are a couple of c-clamps. The only thing keeping it in existence is the fact that I haven’t motivated myself to replace it.
Sombody told me I can polish all that stuff out.. I hope so.
BOOYAKASHA! A horizontal stabilizer. And the spokesmodel sporting a Made In Detroit t-shirt! I tried to get the obligatory flying-lawn-furniture shot, but I didn’t have the time and my wife didn’t have the patience.
Perfectly balanced…
Even the horrendous ding in the skin kind of came out once all the parts were lined up.
And there it is with the blue stuff taken off! Love it!
And now it’s time to do the VS. Much simpler structue, and now the happy builder is armed with the painful lessons of the HS.
More Pictures! Isn’t this great?
Pictures!.
Well, I promised you some pix, and these are them. Finally we have our VPN sorted out with our ISP, so SSL and FTP now work. Which is good, because for a while, I was SOL.
This is the new longeron yoke on the squeezer.. Believe it or not, it works. Next to it is a rivet gauge. It checks shop heads for minimum width and height.
Riveted on the hinge bracket for the VS.
Blurry art-house pic of the flush rivets on the VS forward spar.
Better pic of the forward spar. Notice flush rivets where this part has to somehow connect with something on the fuselage.
Doubler clecoed to VS forward spar. the NO NO NO NO NO thing is something I made up to keep myself from riveting the holes where the rib goes on. P-touch to the rescue.
Flush rivets and clecoed spar/doubler/hinges.
why no pix
Looks like our colo has put us all behind their firewall, and the only way through it is with a VPN connection. The other option is for us, that is me and the small-to-medium-sized gaggle of creative professionals who share resources here, to have our machine directly connected to the internet. Nobody’s actually got time to walk the rampart and keep out all the foul things that could turn our websites into random ones and zeroes, things whose names probably end in -oth or -ith. So I’ll have to make do with text for now, because I can’t ssh or sftp with my shell account. There are options to explore, and this will be remedied soon, but I can’t say when. Meantime, I’m collecting folders, named by date, with pix in them, and i’ll post them later in my usual disorganized fashion.