Finished the leading edge on the right elevator. It looks pretty good. The thicker skin on the elevators is much harder to form than the rudder, but not impossible.
I also drilled out most of the rivets on the bottom of the left elevator in order to put RTV inside to bind the trailing ends of the stiffeners (a step I forgot several days back). I’m letting the RTV set up overnight.
My buddy Steve came by to help out today. It’s great to have an extra set of hands, even on the stuff that doesn’t need a second person, like squeezing rivets. It goes much faster when one person is on the squeezer and the other is handling clecos.
We put RTV into the right elevator, let is set 2 hours, and riveted it back together. Started to bend the leading edge, but ran out of time to finish it.
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Steve helped me form the leading edge on the rudder. The process was not as bad as I had feared from reading other web sites. It is tough to form the curve just right.
We followed the instructions and bent the edge around to about 90 degrees with a 1/2″ (outside diameter 7/8″) galvanized pipe I had laying around. We worked on one section at a time. On the wider part near the bottom, we also moved the pipe back from the edge a bit and formed the metal around the pipe to encourage it into a nice round form. In the end, we still had to do some serious squeezing to line up the holes for clecos and drilling.
I must say the leading edge came out looking sweet. Here’s a shot looking down the length of the rudder.
We also tried to buck some of the rivets in the tight spots of the rudder and elevator with a cold chisel. I’ve read that other people have made that work. It didn’t work for us. I put in MK-319-BS blind rivets instead. In every case these rivets are on a bottom surface or will be covered up by the fiberglass used to fair in the tips. If I had noticed that before, I wouldn’t have even tried to buck them.
I realized a few days ago that I made a mistake on the elevators. To my credit, the instructions aren’t very good and I’ve been working 1 or 2 hours at a time, so it’s easy to forget every little step. I forgot to put RTV in the elevator to link together the stiffners at the trailing edge. I did a bunch of research on the topic. Apparently, this could lead to cracking. Van’s has switched to a thicker skin on the elevators since the problem appeared, so it might be OK. Since I’m just waiting for the wing kit to show up, I might as well fix it.
I spent almost an hour carefully drilling out the rivets on one side of the right elevator.
Squeezed the remaining rivets on the rudder ribs. Well, almost all of the remaining rivets. The forward most rivets are unreachable even with the thin-nose yoke. I’ll get Julie to help me shoot them. I guess I’ll use a cold chisel as a bucking bar. I think I saw someone else do that. If that doesn’t work, I’ll just use blind rivets.
Waiting on the sealant gun to glue up the trailing edge.
Worked on finishing up the vertical stabilizer. I installed grommets in the holes I made in the middle rib for possible future wiring. It should be easy enough to fish a wire through there, if needed, in the future.
Riveted on the rear spar. Two skin rivets on each side could not be reached by the squeezer because of interference with the hinge brackets. I ended up bucking them. This is the first time that I’ve shot and bucked a rivet by myself. Had to drill out twice, but overall they came out good. Must remember to keep pressure on the rivet gun.
Unfortunately, Van’s didn’t supply enough blind rivets for the middle rib. I guess I used them up on the “optional” blind rivets on the bottom of the rudder horn. I added this item to the punch list. I’ll order blind rivets the next time I need something from Van’s.
Except for two blind rivets and of course the fiberglass tip, the VS is now complete!!
I’m waiting on a sealant gun to work on the rudder, so I went back to working on the elevators. Time to put the trim tab together. That is a tough little part to work on. I used the longeron yoke on the squeezer to set the rivets on the lower flange of the spar, including the ones that hold on the horn. I had to carefully maneuver the yoke so as not to scratch the inside of the skin. Setting the forward-most rivet on the horn kind of bent it a bit. I’ll have to figure out how to straighten it out a bit.
I worked on finishing up the vertical stabilizer. I decided to drill a hole in the middle rib for wiring, just in case I decide to put something at the top of the VS. I bought two rubber grommets at Lowe’s that are 5/16″ inside diameter and need a 7/16″ hole. I used the unibit and enlarged the already existing tooling hole to 7/16″. Since I have two grommets, I put one in the front and one in the back. Not sure where I would want to run the wires. I didn’t bother drilling into the top or bottom rib. I can always do that later. I used a Q-tip to swap on some primer to the fresh holes and let it dry overnight.
I can now finish up all of the parts, since they’ve been looked over by an EAA Technical Counselor. I was leaving the last spar unriveted on each component in case he wanted to look inside.
I riveted on the rear spar to the horizontal stabilizer. It’s now finished. Well, except for the fiberglass tips, which I’ll do at the end.
Geoff Sharples, an EAA Technical Counselor that lives nearby, stopped by this evening and gave my project the unofficial seal of approval. It’s unofficial because EAA doesn’t really sign off on projects. Geoff checked over every component, examining rivets, and generally making sure everything looked good. Thanks Geoff!