Finished up organizing the fuselage hardware, which I mostly did while watching TV over the past few days. There is so much more hardware in the fuselage kit that I had to buy another organizer bin. I did find a few extra things and a few missing tube fittings. I’m not too worried about it.
Finished dimpling the bottom skins for the right wing with the C-frame. I believe I am done with the monotonous wing prep. Woo hoo!! I also clecoed the bottom skins on the right wing and drilled out the flap brace. The wing looks pretty cool with the aileron and bottom skins on there.
Sorted more of the fuselage hardware. I thought I could squeeze it all into the two organizers that I have. However, there is a ton of bolts, nuts, washers, etc. in the fuselage kit. I’m going to need another organizer.
Finished deburring and started dimpling the right outboard bottom skin.
I wanted to keep working on the project, but couldn’t find something easy on the wings to work on. I decided to start sorting the hardware for the fuselage. Adele helped me put all of the rivets into the organizer. There were a couple of new sizes, but it’s mainly just more of the same rivets. A lot more. I also sorted through some of the hardware. There are a lot more bolts, washers, and nuts in this kit. I might have to buy one more organizer.
I know some people just leave everything in the bags, and then hunt through them when they need a part. I find it much easier to spend a few hours organizing everything up front. It saves a lot of time in the long run.
After reading everyone’s advice on the RV7and7A Yahoo Group, I decided to try resurrecting the small aileron push tubes. I first tried drilling out one of the rivets. Drilling out the manufactured head was easy, but it wasn’t enough to free the rivet. I also had to drill out the shop head. That was tricky, but not too bad. After drilling out both sides, I had a chunk of rivet still rattling around inside, I had to take the end off to get the junk out.
I drilled out all of the bad rivets, and then tried squeezing -11 rivets with the tube held in a vise. Worked like a charm. They still aren’t the most beautiful rivets around, but they will hold just fine. I cleaned the extra primer off the outside of the tubes with some MEK, and they look great.
I also dimpled around the edge of the right inboard bottom skin and started deburring the right outboard bottom skin.
Finished deburring the right inboard bottom skin.
I spent some time figuring out was is left on the wings. Eventhough it feels like I’m just about done, there’s still a fairly long list: finish flaps, finish push tubes, rivet bottom skins, mount ailerons and flaps, etc.
After that, I started working on the list. I pulled out the bottom skins. I clecoed on the left bottom skins and drilled out the holes for the flap brace. I’ll debur and dimple/countersink later. I put the snap bushings in the left wing for the pitot line. I’m going to use some plastic tubing for the pitot. I’ll run that later.
When I was last working on the right wing, I didn’t get around to deburring and dimpling the right bottom skins, so I started working on that. After finishing the ailerons this weekend, I don’t even mind doing something boring for a while.
The ailerons are done!!! I woke up before the family and had an itch to finish the aileron I started yesterday. I finished it off in an hour or so, still before anybody was up. I threw it onto the wing with just a couple of bolts to check it out. Too cool.
After breakfast I polished off the other aileron and temporarily mounted it as well.
There wasn’t anything too difficult about riveting the ailerons. I used the control surface break to hold the trailing edge nice and straight. Seemed to work great. Both ailerons look perfectly straight to me. Tightening the bolts on the smaller brackets was tough. I ended up putting a wrench on it sideways sort of jammed in there. That worked ok. I torqued all of the nuts to the correct value and sealed them with paint. One minor thing I did mess up, was that the third bolt on the larger bracket (the one that goes in the nut plate) apparently needed an -10L washer instead of a -10 like all of the other bolts. I thought about it for quite a while to decide if it would really make a difference, and then just decided to fix it.
Built the stand for riveting the flaps and got everything ready for riveting. Julie helped rivet the bottom of one flap.
Getting into the rear spar is tough. I ended up using the yoke from the squeezer, a tip I got from someone else’s site. It worked great. The plans don’t call out the rivets very well. I found that -3.5 rivets worked everywhere except where the two skins overlapped a rib. That needed a -4 rivet. On the end rib, I can’t figure out how to buck the rivet under the nut plate (arrow in pic). I read on someone’s site that they recommended attaching the nut plate after riveting the rib. Now I understand why. I’ll probably just use a blind rivet at that spot. I was able to buck all of the rivets where the rear spar intercepts a rib, except on the end rib (other arrow in pic). Again, the nut plate gets in the way. The plans call for a blind rivet there, so I’ll probably just do that.
Riveting the flaps is certainly not easy. It’s a tight squeeze for bucking, but it’s doable.