Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

Re-organized and cleaned up the garage. Julie’s car now fits in the garage–just barely. I need to get some more shelves and unpack the fuselage crates.

Finished riveting most of the right wing rear spar. The inboard most end of the rear spar is hard to squeeze because of the spar doubler. I’ll buck that part after it’s in the cradle. Adele helped me remove tape from the wing.

Julie helped me remove the right wing from the stand and put it in the cradle!!! I can walk through the middle of the garage for the first time in 4+ months. Woo hoo!! I tried squeezing some of the rear spar rivets at the root, but I really need to get out the rivet gun. I’m going to spend some time re-organizing the garage, and then I’ll get back to the wings again.

Julie helped me finish the riveting on the outboard right top skin. We had a few bad rivets from a slipped bucking bar or rivet gun, but overall the riveting went fast. I just need to squeeze the rivets on the rear spar, attach the tank, and this wing will be ready for the cradle.

Julie had some free time and the garage was cool enough, so we did some riveting on the right wing. She riveted and I bucked. We attached the leading edge to the main spar using the new 3X rivet gun. It worked much, much better than the 2X gun. I then squeezed the leading edge skin to main spar rivets. Later in the evening, she helped me rivet one whole wing skin. Awesome! One more skin and this thing goes in the wing cradle.

I started off by priming the inside of the counterweights. It would have been much easier to do this before drilling all of the holes. I taped over the holes and poured in some primer. One of the holes wasn’t well sealed, and I ended up with paint everywhere. Oh well.

I then started to put together the aileron skeletons. Van’s has definitely changed the nose rib to counterweight connection. The instructions say to do this blind rivet first, which is pretty easy to do. Just bend the tab a little bit, pull the rivet, and then bend the rib back in position. Very easy.

I also riveted the reinforcement plates to the spar and the spar to the nose ribs.

The last thing I did on the ailerons today was to cleco the skins to the top of the spar in preparation for riveting. I’m going to wait until Julie can help with it, though.

The hot weather has finally broken. I was going to fly this morning, but we have very low ceilings. I don’t even mind, because today will be 20 degrees cooler than yesterday. Whew!

Cleaned, prepped, and primed the aileron parts. I also sprayed some rattle can self-etching primer on the inside of the nose rib where it will contact the counter weight galvanized pipe.

This is the entry that broke the 500 total hour mark on the project. I’m hoping to get this thing done in less than 2000 hours, so hopefully I’m at least 1/4 of the way there!!

Countersunk the holes on the reinforcement plates for the ailerons. Deburred the ends of the counterweights and countersunk the attach holes with a regular drill bit. The instructions go to great length to say the countersink can be 100 degrees instead of 120 degrees, but they don’t say what difference it makes. The Orndorff video suggests not to use countersink cutters as they will get chewed up by the steel. Instead, a regular old drill bit is good enough. It doesn’t make a pretty countersink, but it works fine.

I then did the trick of putting the counterweight plus nose skin on a couple of 2×4’s and whacked a dimple die into the skin. Works pretty good.
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The CS4-4 rivets aren’t going to set perfectly flush anyway, because the skin bends right there. I also dimpled all of the other holes on the spars and skins. For being so small, the ailerons have a lot of holes. I think I’m ready for primer.

The counterweights are each just a tiny bit longer than the nose skin. It’s only about 1/32″ on each side. I’m not sure if that is important or not.

I noticed on somebody’s web site that they had polished the outside of the counterweight. I don’t think that’s a good idea. A galvanized pipe is fairly rustproof, because of the galvanization. It’s a thin layer of I think zinc. If you sand that off, it’s not going to be very resistant to corrosion.

It has been blazin’ hot here lately, mid to upper 90’s. It just doesn’t normally get that hot here in Seattle. The shop was toasty:

A few new tools arrived from Cleaveland. I finally broke down and got a #8 nut plate jig. I guess there are a bunch more nut plates on the fuselage and this will make it go faster. I also bought a 3X rivet gun. The 2X just isn’t able to effectively set the leading edge rib to wing spar rivets. I’m going to use the 3X gun for that.

Deburring the aileron parts took a long time, especially the nose ribs. Watched Lance clinch his record six win while filing and sanding away. All of the parts are now deburred. On to countersinking, dimpling, priming, and finally assembly.

The 30-day time limit for claiming missing items from the fuselage kit is almost running out, so it was time to do an inventory. The number of parts in the fuselage kit is daunting. I recognized the big pieces, but there are dozens of little parts as well. I didn’t even inventory the contents of the bags. I just checked to make sure every bag was in there. I’m going to buy some shelves to store the parts. For now, I just put everything back in the boxes after I unwrapped and counted it. Adele helped me quite a bit with the inventory.

This kit certainly looks like more fun than the wings.