Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

Started match drilling the elevator skeleton. Couldn’t get the counterbalance skin to line up right with the counterbalance and end ribs. Something is not quite right.

Smoothed the edges of the elevator skins with the Scotchbrite wheel, deburring tool, files, and emory cloth. I’m getting better at this, but it’s still a time-consuming process.

Dimpled all of the stiffener holes in the skins with the C-frame. Julie helped hold the skin flat for the holes that are way in the crease of the skins.

Washed all of the elevator stiffeners in preparation for etching and priming.

Deburred the stiffener holes in the right elevator skin. Also dimpled the holes that I could reach with the squeezer.

Squeezed most of the rest of the rivets in the rudder skeleton. The rivets in the rudder horn are especially tricky. I tried various combinations of yokes and sets until I settled on using the longeron yoke, one medium length set and one short set. It was still tricky to get the yoke in there around the nut plate.

I left until later the rivets toward the rear and the entire trailing edge. I want the technical advisor to be able to look in there, if needed.

The rudder is looking great. Can’t wait to finish it off, even though two of the trickier parts are ahead, riveting the trailing edge and bending the leading edge.

Deburred the stiffener holes on the left elevator skin.

Started riveting the rudder skins to the skeleton. Discovered that I had made a mistake a while back. I forgot to dimple the two holes on the front side of the top rudder rib. I wish I had noticed that before I riveted it to the spar. Luckily, I was able to pivot it out to the point where I could get the dimple dies on it and fix the problem.

I also had a problem getting some of the holes to line up perfectly. Some of the rivets were sitting crooked when I dropped them in. I borrowed a trick I read somewhere and re-dimpled both the skin and the rib together on the problem holes. That fixed it great. I’m about 1/3 done on riveting the rudder skins to the skeelton.

The replacement screws and nuts for the rudder counterweight showed up. I ordered them Saturday and they showed up Wednesday via FedEx Ground. Not bad. Van’s only charged a few bucks handling and a few bucks freight. I probably could have found them locally, but didn’t want to waste the time running around.

After staring at a few of the rivets on the rudder reinforcement plates a while longer, I decided I still didn’t like the lookes of them even after redoing them once already. I took some advice from the Yahoo RV7 list and bumped up the pressure to 100 psi. The gauge that came with the tank definitely needs to be replaced. It varies +/- 5 psi for no reason. The higher pressure along with concentrating on lining up the squeezer better produced very good results. I’m happy with all of the rivets on the reinforcement plates now.

I attached the rudder counterweight with the new hardware and then clecoed the rudder skins onto the spar. The instructions are pretty good about spelling out the steps. There are 9 rivets in the skin per side that must be set before putting on the top rib. Did that, but didn’t get any further. Somebody had a piano recital tonight (and she did great).

This shot shows that I had to make the slot in the skin a little bit larger in order to provide some space around the rudder horn.

Deburred the holes in the elevator stiffeners. Dimpled the holes in the stiffeners. Did I mention there are a lot of stiffeners? I had some help, though.

More fun with stiffeners. I drilled all of the stiffeners to the elevator skins. I also drilled the trim cover plate reinforcement to the skin.

Started on the elevators! Rough cut all of the stiffeners with the band saw (could have used snips, but the band saw is so quick). Cleaned up the cuts with the belt sander and then smoothed all of the edges with the Scotch-brite wheel. There sure are a lot of stiffeners. The picture on the left shows how they start out. Keep in mind that each pile in the right-hand picture is 4 to 7 stiffeners.