Last night I continued on the task of creating horizontal stabilizer brackets. I dug around my shop in search of the best tool for cutting the heavy aluminum. The hacksaw worked well, but I could not help but think that there must be something better. I tried my Dewalt 20v oscillating tool with a metal […]
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Last night I got to do a little manufacturing. The task was to build a horizontal spar attachment bracket. This is the first time I’ve had to work with material this thick. My first challenge was to measure out all the cut lines. Being “over 40”, I did a lot of this under a desktop […]
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Today I assembled the rear spar for the horizontal stabilizer. The tasks involved were preparing and mounting hinge brackets and attaching the doubler to the spar with a great pile of rivets. Attaching the doubler to the spare web was nothing too difficult. To start, I removed ALL the plastic (I hope you are happy […]
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Today, I tucked the completed rudder in to it’s new home for a couple months in the basement to make room on the bench for the next part… The horizontal stabilizer (HS)! With the parts all laid out, I started anew with great optimism and a careful dose of “don’t screw this up”! The first […]
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Today is a great day! The first full part of my plane is built! After weeks of working, making mistakes, fixing them, I finally have something to show for all my hard work. Now that it is done, I have a new problem: Where do I store this part to keep it from being damaged […]
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Day 12 was a day that proved something. When I was starting this project, I had two options. I could setup in the garage at home, or I could setup in my hangar at the airport. The hangar is of course ideally suited to the task, but I chose the garage for two reasons: 1) […]
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On this day, I spent most of my time working on ONE rivet. If you are a builder, you likely already know where this is going. I recently posted about this problem on FaceBook and I got a list of possible solutions that I tried on a practice piece and in the end, I did […]
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It’s been a busy few days, and I have not had time to update my logs, so here is three days in one! Day 9 and 10, I was focused on closing up the rudder skins. I started off with attaching the top rib to the skin. This will be the last back riveting I […]
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Today’s job was to rivet the stiffeners to the skins. The primary technique required is back-riveting. I quite like this technique as it is easier to do than shooting rivets the normal way. The gun fits nicely over the shop head and can bounce around a bit without destroying your work like I did with […]
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Tonight, I drove the first rivets for the empennage! The task was to assemble the bottom rib and attach the reinforcement plates and nut plates. The first part went off without a hitch, and I ended up with a pretty nice looking part that kinda looked like a spaceship! Seeing as I have not riveted […]
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