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!