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.