Aileron Work!

Wow, what a productive today. We started with a pile of primed parts and ended up with completed ailerons! Two of them!

After some breakfast and coffee at the airport cafe, we headed over to the hangar. To our surprise our hangar partner's car was there and his airplane was gone. Not too common that that happens, but hey, more hangar to us!

Since we hadn't gotten too much work done on our poor RV lately we really wanted to make some progress today. We were having some problems yesterday riveting the nose ribs to the aileron spars, our rivets kept on folding over on the shop end side. FRUSTRATING! But today we decided we would try as many solutions as we could until we found one that worked. Previously we had been squeezing them, which never gave us problems before, but the rivets that Van's calls out seemed a little long. We trimmed them and tried that, no luck. After a few times drilling them out from the shop end side (no access to the manufactured head) our circular holes had become quite oblonged. Not an ideal shape for a solid rivet to be set in, so we decided we would make a couple of plates to cover the holes. This worked previously on other parts of the project, but this time we set one rivet and the plate just folded up because the rivet sucked it into the hole a bit. Our only other option was to use some strong blind rivets. We drilled the holes out to 5/32" and put those suckers in. They filled up the hole and made the part very strong. Finally something worked!

We continued on and riveted the leading edge skin to the trailing edge skin and the spar. Initially this proved to be tricky, and a little painful. It took a while to figure out how to fit your hand between the bottom of the aft skin and the spar to get a bucking bar in but we finally devised a way to get it done. Dad held the skin on its trailing edge and I shot and bucked the rivets. Once this was done we riveted the nose ribs to the top half of the leading edge skin and then the main ribs, once these are done the assembly gets flipped over and weighted down. The counterbalance weight gets blind riveted to the skin and the ribs get finished being riveted to the skin. Once everything else is done you finish it by "closing" it with blind rivets along the bottom of the spar. Once the left flap was done we moved onto the right and banged that out. Only this time we had better luck with squeezing the larger rivets and we had a better understanding of how we wanted to do things!

If only all days at the hangar were like this, productivity feels great!

Busy, with work other than RV work.

Unfortunately I don't have too much new to post. I've been busy studying for the CFI certificate and have been devoting most of my time to work and that. Though we have completed the flaps, which was movivating! They look great and they feel bulletproof. Our right flap ended up having a 3/32" twist in it, but that's so nominal we can't imagine it having any noticeable adverse effects. Tomorrow Dad and I are both off and we hope to get some work done on the fuel tanks, though today after flying the 150 for a couple of hours I noticed a large accumulation of oil on the belly. The dipstick didn't show a loss of oil so until we check it out, it remains a mystery where it is coming from. Nice weather is forecasted so we'll see how it goes.

Fuel Tank End Ribs

Today Dad and I figured we would get cracking on the fuel tank pick up tubes. In the last post I noted that we would have to make a new hole for the flop tube, which would be located at the front of the inboard rib, and not on the access plate. We had already cut out the hole for the standard pick up tube in the plate and instead of making a cover for the hole, Dad fabricated a beautiful brand new one out of some .060" stock that we had. It looks great!

The hole up for the flop tube was a multi step process. Our unibit only goes up to 1/2" and the fitting was significantly bigger (I can't remember the diameter) so we used ours, and then finished the hole with our friends larger unibit. We had to do this for the rib, the angle bracket, and the backing plate. There is a proper position for the fitting noted in the plans, but we didn't see this until after we had cut the hole. Lucky us we were within 1/16 of an inch!

After we got the hole done, I had to head to work but Dad stayed at the hangar and continued to make some progress. He was able to cut an anti-rotation bracket for the right tank pick up and he also made the trap door that fits over the corner hole on the interior rib. After that he made the bracket that goes over the left side inspection plate so the flop tube doesn't get hung up. We still have the othe one to make that fits inside the bay.

All in all, today was a pretty productive day!

Fuel Tank Update

Today we received our new "flop" fuel line from Van's. The craftsman ship on this is beautiful! It really looks like high quality stuff, not that I didn't expect it, but it still impressed me. Though after looking at how it is mounted to the root wing rib, I realized that it mounts to the very leading edge of it. We already cut the holes in the access plates and we'll have to make a plate to cover the hole in the left side access plate. No big deal, but I'm glad we're starting to figure out how this thing attaches and functions.

Left: Our new flop tube!

Right: The left angle that needs be cut to accept the 90 degree fitting for the flop tube.

We might take care of this tomorrow, but we want to get the ailerons riveted together to get some parts out of the way! I'll have to be leaving the airport around 2:30 for work so we'll see what we can get done! Looking forward to manana.

Priming!

Finally! A day that Dad and I both had off and the weather was good! The weather forecast called for 65 degrees today but it ended up being about 72. We knew we were going to be able to get a lot done today, and we did! After the ritual breakfast at the cafe we headed over to the hangar to get to work.

We started by rolling all of our stuff out of the hangar (work bench for parts and paint, saw horses, air compressor, etc.) We used our normal process of preparing our parts, they were all previously Scotchbrited and we started with the Alumiprep today. Dad scrubs the parts to be primed, and I have the task of rinsing and drying the parts, then we set them all in position on our saw horses on top of a metal grate. There were a few clouds hiding the sun, but they blew in and out. Once the parts were all cleaned we immediately got to mixing our two part epoxy primer. This stuff isn't as nice as the self-etching stuff in the can, but it gets the job done. It took a good couple of hours to get all the parts primed and covered well. We primed the parts for the flaps as well as the aileron skins, a couple of wing ribs, the fuel tank baffles, and some fuel tank brackets. The difficult part is finding the spots that you missed. The primer is almost exactly the same color as the milky-white Alumipreped metal so you have to let it dry, then angle it to the sun to find the bare spots. It felt good to get these parts primed though! We've been waiting to do this for a while.

While we let the parts dry, we cleaned up our work area and got some stuff put away. We primed the aileron skins so we would be able to get the stiffeners (previously primed) riveted to them, and that's exactly the next step we did. We used the backdimpling method the plans call for and continued to work outside since it was such perfect weather. Our method consisted of filling four rows of rivet holes with rivets, taping them and then backriveting. Once the four rows were finished, we'd fill the next four rows and reuse the tape and so on. This way we were efficient and fast. Once the stiffeners were riveted we decided to call it a day and get heading home. The next step was to finish the bend in the aileron skins and our homemade bending break was at the house (it's already in the truck ready to go for tomorrow though) All in all we had a productive day, and only one rivet had to be drilled!

Priming Prep

Today I met Dad at the airport and we decided to get all of the parts ready for priming. They're all pretty much prepared but we organized them into a pile for when we'll be priming. Also I took a friend of ours flying today, it was his first time being in a small airplane, and he had a blast! He'd been in airliners and a C-130 before, but nothing along the lines of a 44 year old Cessna 150. Needless to say it was a new experience for him. No need for any pictures tonight, everything mostly looks the same, except for the left fuel tank skin, which we dimpled today. Hopefully we'll be able to prime on Thursday!