Started Vertical Stabilizer

I love weekends. They provide a chance to rest, relax, sleep in, forget about work, catch up on cleaning my house, and most importantly... BUILD! I really like the uninterrupted, productive work sessions I'm able to have during my weekends. Tonight was no exception. I started work on my vertical stabilizer. A lot of builders will start their projects by building the VS... and after working on it for a while, I can see why... it is much simpler than the HS. The whole assembly is made up of only eleven parts. I had a lot of fun working on this tonight.

To begin I had to flute the ribs, then cleco the skeleton together and match drill it.

The rear VS spar, stiffener and hinge brackets clecoed together

The whole VS skeleton clecoed together

After match drilling the skeleton, I clecoed the skin on it and match drilled the skin. Pretty simple!

The VS all clecoed together... looks awesome!

I then was able to begin deburring some of the parts before deciding to call it a night. So far, so good. I think I could have the VS ready for primer by the end of the weekend... if I don't make any mistakes like I've made on the HS!

It still pumps me up to see these parts coming together. It's also still somewhat surreal to think I'm actually building an airplane. Every time I hear a plane fly over or see one on approach to the runway near my house, I feel a little boost in my motivation to keep things moving so I can get this thing into the air and realize my dream. Still a long way to go, but the progress I've made so far is exciting!

More Dimpling... and Another Mistake

I spent last night dimpling the rest of the HS, including the understructure. The left side skin was dimpled using the DRDT-2 dimpler.

The left skin all dimpled

The understructure was dimpled using my pneumatic squeezer. This tool is awesome... it's essentially an air-actuated piston that squeezes either rivets or, when a dimple die is inserted in the tool, creates dimples. It makes quick work of making dimples... and as I found out, sometimes too quickly. Unfortunately, the squeezer got away from me a little bit and I ended up missing one of the holes while dimpling. Damn.

The hole that was missed with the squeezer

A rivet placed in the hole so you can see how far off the accidental dimple was

A shot of the underside, showing the damage

I've read on the Van's Air Force forums that this is a fairly common mistake that builders make, but most make it while dimpling skins. In almost every case, the builders were told that it wasn't a critical mistake and the builder could build on with a pretty simple fix. My mistake was made in the forward spar top flange though, so I didn't find any solutions to my particular mistake. So I contacted Van's builder support to see if they had a suggestion for me. I got an answer back pretty quickly... and as I figured, this hole is considered a critical joint because it is where a rib will attach, meaning it will see more stress than a hole where just the skin attaches. Because of the uncertainty of how much strength in that joint would be lost because of this mistake, the engineers recommended I replace the part. Such is my luck! So I've ordered the replacement part (luckily it was only $20) and will rework it when I receive it in the next few days.

This mistake was particularly frustrating because of the significant progress I've been making lately. I was hoping it'd be a quick fix, which would allow me to stick to my plan for this weekend. My plan was to prime all of the parts, which would've allowed me to get to pounding some rivets in the next week, but that will all have to wait. I'll chalk this up as a learning experience and make sure I'm taking my time to carefully dimple my parts with the pneumatic squeezer from now on.

So this weekend, I now plan to begin working on the vertical stabilizer, drilling and match drilling those parts. That way I won't be letting this mistake completely stop my progress. If I make some good progress on the VS, I may put myself in a situation that will allow me to prime both the HS and VS in one session. I'll keep you updated!

All of the spars dimpled... one of which will be replaced

Deburring and Dimpling HS

This weekend was pretty productive. I was able to finish deburring all of the HS parts and moved on to dimpling the skins. So far I have the right HS skin dimpled. I've got the left skin and the understructure left to dimple. When I'm finished with that, the HS will be ready for the priming process. Looking forward to getting to the point of pounding some rivets!

After deburring, I removed strips of vinyl where the rivets will go. This will protect the rest of the skin from scratches.

This is the inside of the skin, with the vinyl removed and deburring done. It hurt me inside a little bit to go scratching up these beautiful skins, but it had to be done. Deburring of the holes on the interior of the skin was just done with 400-grit sandpaper. 

Here you can see both the left and right HS skins next to each other. Gives some perspective of the final size of the tail.

Dimpling the skins with the DRDT-2 dimpler. This thing is awesome and pretty easy to use. A second set of hands would definitely be helpful though!

A close-up of the dimples. They came out very nice and crisp.

A close-up of the back side of the dimples

The bottom side of the right HS skin all dimpled

Deburring HS Skeleton

I spent a couple hours last night deburring the edges of the horizontal stabilizer skeleton. "Deburring" means removing sharp edges or chips on the edges of metal parts, including the holes I've drilled. These sharp points and chips are a place where stress can concentrate and eventually cause cracks in the metal. By removing those sharp points and chips, the stress spreads evenly across the whole part, reducing the chances of cracking. I've hear deburring is one of the most time-consuming tasks in building an RV, and I completely believe that at this point. ha! It's going to take quite a while to prep the skeleton and skins, making sure I've knocked down any burrs. But it's an important step in making a strong, quality airplane and that's what I'm going for. Deburring isn't all that exciting, so I didn't get any pictures of the work last night. I've got a couple more nights of deburring left before I can get on to dimpling the parts and then priming them. Hopefully will get a couple free night in the next few days to do that though...

Back At It

Well it's been a long month since I last got anything really significant done on my project. Work has been super busy lately. At the end of the fiscal year, my squadron gets really busy trying to compete for construction project funding that gets released in the last few days of the FY. And the pace at work didn't really slow down after 30 September either. We have a big inspection coming up at the end of October so that's kept me really busy as well. And then on top of that, I've had my Master's degree classes I've been trying to keep up with. So overall, just haven't had time to put much work into the airplane.

OK, OK... enough with the excuses. I did work a little bit on the project a few weeks ago to correct my mistake on the forward spar reinforcing angle. That fix went pretty quickly, so I don't have any pictures of it. Anyway, I got back to really working on the project yesterday, completing some prep work on the left-side horizontal stabilizer by match drilling and match drilling the skin and skeleton. This all went pretty smoothly and got me really excited to see the skin clecoed to the skeleton... awesome!

Today I was able to work through all of the drilling and match drilling on the right-side horizontal stabilizer. This work included some fluting of the ribs to ensure they were completely straight (something that took me some time to figure out). As with the left side, everything went pretty well. I had some struggles getting the skin to line up with the skeleton just right, but figured it out pretty quickly.

Fluting the ribs to straighten them

Left-side HS skeleton clecoed together

Using a lot of clamps to hold things in place

A close up of a little blood. Now I can say I've bled and sweated for this project... no tears yet. Those skins are sharp though!

Left-side HS all drilled and match drilled

Right-side HS drilled and match-drilled

Proof that I am actually doing this work. ha!

It felt really good to get back to work on the project... and to make some significant progress to boot! I've disassembled everything at this point and I will now deburr all of the edges and holes, dimple the skins and understructure, and then prep the parts for primer. It'll likely be at least a week or so before I actually get to the primer, but I'm going to try to keep plugging away. We have the inspection I mentioned coming up soon and I'll be working some really long hours on those days, so hopefully I can get the parts primed before that begins.

On a side note, after almost nine months of not flying, I got back up in the air last week. My medical expired while I was deployed, so I got that taken care of and then joined the base's aero club. After a Biennial Flight Review, I was cleared to fly again! Got a chance to have some fun flying around the local area with my buddy Scott this past weekend. It felt great to be back up there! 

Scott and me buzzing around the local area

My First Oops

Damn. I was wondering when it would happen, but it happened sooner than I wished it had. Tonight I made my first mistake. I started in on drilling one of the ribs for the empennage tonight. Drilling the forward flange of the HS-405 rib is a bit of a trick for a lot of builders as the plans don't show a ton of detail and can be a bit confusing. After doing some searching online, I found another builder's log which details how he drilled the rib and it looked like a pretty solid plan to me. So I started out using his advice and was cruising along, thinking I was doing really well. Until I got ready to drill the second hole. Then I realized my mistake.

Everything clamped and clecoed in place, ready to be drilled

First hole drilled

It's tough to see in my first picture, but I had clamped the reinforcing angle (HS-714) upside down before I drilled. Unfortunately, I didn't catch this until after I had it drilled. This wouldn't have been too big of a deal had it been the bottom angle, as these holes drilled in the bottom angle are centered vertically on it. On the top angle, though, they are not centered vertically so this hole I drilled will not work on the opposite side if I were just to flip it over. I'm considering calling Van's builder support tomorrow to see what they say, but I'm nearly certain I'll have to buy a new angle. I measured where the new hole would be if I arranged it properly and drilled again, but the two holes (the correct one and the oops) would be very close, and I doubt if this would provide enough support to keep the rivet from pulling through to the oops hole. I will likely have to buy a new one and start over. Luckily this is a cheap and fairly small piece so shipping shouldn't be too much. If I keep this pace up though, this project is going to cost me A LOT.

The hole my index finger is pointing to needs to be offset to the opposite side of the angle.

I've learned some good lessons from this mistake, but it is still very frustrating that I made it. It was just a stupid mistake that I attribute to rushing to get too much done tonight. I can tell doing things slowly and deliberately is going to be a challenge for me on work nights. I get up at about 5 or 5:30am every morning, so I like to try to be in bed by 9pm or so. By the time I make the 40 minute drive home, get changed, eat some food and get started, it's already almost 7pm. Up to this point, this has left me feeling rushed to get a significant amount of work done. It really comes down to expectation management though. I just need to convince myself that I likely won't make much significant progress during the week. And I have to learn to be OK with that. As I said earlier in the log, my goal is just to build my airplane. Nowhere in that goal is there a timeline. So from now on, I will work really hard at slowing myself down and double- and triple-checking my work. As I've said before, as long as I'm doing SOMETHING almost every night, I'll be happy. Now I just have to act that way. I know I will still make mistakes, but I want to minimize them.

So, tonight was a lesson-learning night. I'm sure it won't be my last of those.

Rib-Straightening Tool

Today I had some school work to take care of so I didn't get much done on my project. I know that I need to get my Master's degree finished up in the next couple years, so I am going to make sure I dedicate enough time to that. I did, however, take some time to build a rib-straightening tool. I'd seen this on Van's Air Force and after trying to straighten a few ribs by hand, I decided it would be worth my time to build one of these now. The flanges of the ribs come out of the manufacturing process being a bit off from the 90 degree angle to the web which they have to be. So it's up to the builder to bend these flanges to the 90 degree angle. This tool makes doing that very quick, easy and accurate. I used some hard wood and cut an 11 degree angle in the wood, as suggested by some other builders on the Van's Air Force forums. This allows me to straighten the flange while still allowing for some spring-back that happens in the metal.

Side view of the rib-straightening tool

Another view of the tool

I was pretty happy with how the tool came out, though there are a couple improvements I plan to make to it at some point in the future. I misdrilled one of the holes for the bolt that attaches the steel to the handle, so the handle is offset a bit. No biggy for now... I used it to straighten all of my empennage ribs after I finished it and they came out great.