Riveting Front HS Spar and Rear VS Spar

Today we started riveting the front HS spar to the 710 Reinforcement angle and 714 Splice angle. This turned out very nice and gave us a chance to start using the rivet gun. Once the front HS spar was riveted together we began removing the film from the rudder skins with our soldering iron so we could start priming them, we also got the films removed from the HS stab skins as well. We didn't prime the skins today though, the Santa Anas began to blow and made for inadequate priming weather. But this step should be under way tomorrow, until then, they'll be sitting deburred and ready. We also started riveting the rear VS spar together. We only set about 30 rivets though, my hands weren't going to take the squeezing anymore. Hmmm, if only we had a pneumatic squeezer? Nah, we're trying to save money.

Riveted Rear HS Spar

I must say, today we made a lot of progress. After school I got straight to work on the rudder stiffeners while I waited for Dad to get home. Once those were all cut to size and rounded off, we moved on to riveting the rear HS spar. These would be the first structural rivets for us to set on the RV. 164 AD4 rivets altogether holding the stiffeners and hinge brackets to the rear spar; and they were all hand squeezed.. the palms of my hands are deeply bruised but it was well worth it! Not one rivet turned out bad! It's truly rewarding to finally see some parts come together. We've also decided that we're going to prime the inside of all of our skins. Though it may add weight, it'll add a lot of protection and it's only one more step. Waiting until we have a torque wrench before we attach the bearing assembly to the rear spar assembly.

Priming and Dimpling

Lately Dad and I have been doing a lot of prep work for getting ready to rivet the horizontal stablizer. He's been in charge of priming the parts while I've been taking care of the dimpling. Both jobs require a lot of work, and dimpling is tiring.. hah! We've gotten the Vertical stabilizer under construction as well, in fact it's just as ready for riveting as the Horizontal is. I've also started cutting the rudder stiffeners that'll be riveted to the inside of the rudder skins. At first I had no idea how these were supposed to be cut, but after about 45 minutes of thinking, I figured it out.

First RV Flight

Today was a great day. Dad and I went out to the airport to meet up with our friends and have some breakfast at the cafe. We later went over to our friend Jack Pickering's hangar where he keeps a beautiful RV-6A that was finished in 1996 and his stepson Dwayne's RV-7A which is currently under construction. While we were there we picked their brains about priming our parts, asking about Alodine and Alumiprep. We decided that we're going to skip the Alodining process and stick with using Alumiprep and then spraying a coat of olive drab self-etching primer over the parts. I was looking at Jack's RV-6A and noticed he had won an award at Oshkosh with it. He let me sit in it to get a feeling for the airplane, see how much leg room there was, how the sliding canopy worked, etc. It was then when he asked me when I would have time to go for a flight. I looked at my dad and he could tell I was excited, I told him I was able to go now! I just had to be back in time for work.
We pulled N96EV out of the hangar and did the walk-around/preflight. He showed me what to check out, not too much different from the 150G we currently fly. We put a quart of oil into his modified Lycoming IO-360 and she was ready to take to the skys. We hopped in and he showed me his start up process for the injected engine. Boost pump on, wait a few seconds, then put it to off, push in the mixture and turn the engine over. It came to life! It sounded awesome I must say. We taxied to Runway 23, did the run up and he let me take off. As soon as I started feeding in the throttle I felt myself sinking into the seat. Keep some back pressure on the stick and we're off in a few hundred feet. Hello 2000+ fpm! About 8x the climb performance of our little 150. We departed on a left down wind and did some power off stalls as well as a few aileron rolls. I couldn't believe the performance that was at my hands with the RV, it only made me want to go home and get cracking even more on the 7! After a few steep turns I lined us up on a left 45 for the downwind for Rwy 23 and let Jack take over. After a greased landing we taxied back in and shut her down. I was very satisfied. It's such a beautiful flying airplane and has so much performance there's nothing to dislike about it. I thanked Jack with full gratitude and I owe him for introducing me to RV flight. Do you need any parts polished Jack? It was a great day for flying, and I had an awesome time.

Preparing the Ribs

It's been a while since I've been able to post our progress, but we've still been hammering away at getting the horizontal stabilizer complete. Today was all about preparing the ribs and fitting the skin. I went straight home after work and met up with my dad and we immediately went to working on the plane. We started by truing the flanges on the ribs and getting them as close as possible to 90 degrees. This proved to be a bit more difficult then we thought.. When the ribs come from the factory, the flanges are at about 80 degrees, and they have to be bent to 90 in order to fit flush against the interior of the skin. We did this by pressing the flanges against the soft side of one of our work benches. It took about an hour or so to get all the ribs right, but it was an hour well spent. We also cut the notches in the forward flanges of HS-404 to accomodate for HS-710 and HS-714. Taking off the burs with Scotchbrite finished the process.

Once this was done, we went on to fluting the flanges. This process eliminates the unwanted bow that occurs from when the ribs are punched out of the aluminum sheet at the warehouse. We used Alan Gilmore's technique that worked very well for fluting accurately and predictably. He has a YouTube video located at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqNoVAQLo0M which helped a lot.

After the ribs were fluted and ready, we clecoed them to the front and rear HS spar assemblies and then we fitted the skin to the complet assembly. The pre-drilled holes in the skin match up perfectly with the holes in the ribs, making it quick to put together. So far, this has been the most inspirational moment of the project, it actually looks like an airplane part! The only problem we encountered so far was a large scratch on the HS-601PP skin, it doesn't look too deep, but we're going to call up Van's and see if it's normal to receive parts like that. I know scratches are a hazard when building an airplane, acting as fatigue points which can later turn into cracks. Hopefully a bit of Scotchbriting will take it out.

Front HS Spar

I got to work today on the airplane as soon as I got home from work. I was thinking about building all day and couldn't wait until I would be able to continue. I started tapering the ends of HS-710 and HS-714. Initially I used our Dremel tool with a cut off wheel to knock off as much of the excess aluminum as possible. This proved to work quite well but using the Scotchbrite wheel on the bench grinder alone work surprisingly faster. It's amazing how beautiful of a finish the parts are left with after using the Scotchbrite wheel!

Once the tapering was done on the aluminum stock we moved on to putting the 6 degrees of bend in them that the plans called for. We used our vise with wood blocks sandwiching the part to avoid marring up the surface, and once the piece was in the vise we aimed another piece of wood at the bend and used a 2 lb. deadblow mallet to apply the bending force.

The Buiding Begins

It's the day that every RV builder waits for. The day that he or in many cases, she, begins the building process of their future aircraft. I got to dad's house around 10 o'clock and immediately we got to work. We initialized the process today by grabing the 'pick list' and calling off part numbers to take inventory of everything that lay in the boxes. This took us a good two hours to complete, but this process is well worth it.

Once we had inventoried both boxes we began with the first step: 'breaking' the edges of the 609PP's so they would lay flat inside of the rear horizontal spar. We weren't too sure on how we were going to do this so we started filing down the ends of each spar doubler to a nice radius. Initially we used a Vixen file to take the corners off, then we moved to the Dremel to round it even further, and we finished it off with the Scotchbrite wheel on our bench grinder.

After the ends were rounded nicely we decided to use the Scotchbrite wheel to take off the edges of the doublers. This worked quite well and it only took a few solid passes to get them to lay flat inside the spar.

We continued to go through the steps and match drilled the doublers to the spar as well as the elevator hinge brackets. We deburred everything with Scotchbrite pads and got everything to a satin finish, this should allow the primer to bond nicely in the future. So far this is all fun work but I've read many times that deburring gets quite old.

We concluded the night by clecoing the HS-710 and HS-714 to the HS-702 front spars and marked out the cuts that we'll have to make on them before they get bent. I plan on doing this first thing after work tomorrow.