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.