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!

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!

Counterbalance Work

Today once I got to the hangar I decided the only thing I would really be able to do was countersink the counterbalance for the ailerons. Tomorrow Dad and I are both off and will have a good day to get some much needed priming done! It's been too long since we've both had a day off when the weather is good so we're going to take advantage of it tomorrow! Once we have all of our parts primed we'll be able to start riveting the main ribs to the main and aft spars. We'll also be able to continue our work on the ailerons and flaps. Hopefully we'll be able to complete the bend of the trailing edge skin for the aileron as well. Tomorrow's going to be a productive day, I can feel it!

Aileron Skin Work

Today Dad and I were able to get quite a bit of work done on the project. We started the day out with breakfast at Bambi's Hangar One cafe on the airport and chatted with our friends Jack and Dwayne. We saw a couple of regular RV's sitting outside; an -8 and a -6A, both beautiful aircraft. After a quick bite and a couple cups of coffee I made my way over to the flight school to speak with my flight instructor/good friend Ed Matthews while Dad opened up the hangar. Today we scheduled my checkride for the commercial license and figured how we were going to work it. It feels great to finally have this thing scheduled, and once it's over there'll be more time to think about the RV! Also it had been over a month since the last time I flew so I decided to knock some rust off and practice the commercial maneuvers. It felt awesome to be back in the air!

I had finished cutting and shaping the aileron stiffeners a couple of days ago so we decided we would finish match drilling them to their appropriate skins. Once that was done we moved on to dimpling the parts and cleaned up the edges. I used the hand squeezer to dimple the stiffeners and Dad and I continued to use our backdimpling method for the skins. Needless to say they turned out flawlessly! We're still having a blast working on the project and the progress keeps us motivated for sure.