This was a long day, and I got a lot done. I also made a few mistakes along the way, but luckily, I’m getting good at drilling out rivets. Too bad I’m not just as good at following instructions! To start, I connected the two inspar ribs with a stringer web. My rivets were perfect. […]
Read More
With the rest of the parts done, the last phase before riveting was to dimple the skins. I started off by doing the edges with my pneumatic squeezer. It does a decent job, but I missed the hole with one of the shots and made a new one. I sent a picture of the damage […]
Read More
With only one side of a spar let to countersink, I was able to finish that task and start dimpling. With the help of my pneumatic squeezer, I got through ALL of the little pieces. What’s left now is to do the skins. That will be another night.
Read More
With the parts in piles, I have three big jobs ahead. Today was the day to tackle the countersinking. With a couple hours to spare, I got much of it done. I’ve just got one side of a spar left to do. Once that is done, I can work on dimpling, and then deburring.
Read More
After a couple days of getting to see this thing take shape, and a day or so of match drilling, I am back to a pile of aluminum that is now a long task of deburring and dimpling. Most of the work today was the drilling. Nothing really special, but a nice relaxing task of […]
Read More
Today I got to work on the somewhat lengthy task of match drilling the holes holes in the skins. This task is not particularly complex, but a bit tedious. It’s easy to lose your place. A few holes definitely got reamed twice. One exciting surprised was when I read in the instructions to “use an […]
Read More
After a nice easy couple weeks of working on the vertical stabilizer, it was finally time to get back to work on the horizontal stabilizer. I was a bit nervous to start this task because I don’t have a very large table to work on. It’s only about 6’ long and the stabilizer is of […]
Read More
After a long day of driving rivets, the vertical stabilizer is finally done! I was loathing having to “reach inside” to buck rivets into the stabilizer, but like many things, it was not so bad once I finally got started. The first challenge was riveting the skin to the middle in-spar rib. I called a […]
Read More