Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

Finished deburring and started dimpling the first aft side skin.

Deburred the aft bottom skin and dimpled around the edges with the pneumatic squeezer. Deburred most of one of the side skins. One or two more session and I should have the deburring done on the aft section. Then it’s time for dimpling with the C-frame.

Drilled the center bottom fuselage skin to the structure.

Trimmed the corner ribs following the way that Matthew Brandes did it. As others have pointed out, the plans are very vague on how to trim the ends of the corner ribs. Seeing how somebody else did it saved me a lot of time worrying about it. Thanks Matthew.

After trimming a bit off the end, the corner ribs matched the skin edge within 1/32″, which should be good enough. The instructions say to flute the rib. It doesn’t need much fluting, just enough to match the slight bend of the baggage ribs. I worried for a while how to figure out where the holes are on the rib flanges, so I could flute between them. Turns out there are no holes in the flanges on the corner ribs.

After getting the corner ribs fitted, I drilled the bottom skin to the ribs. I also fitted the forward attach strips and drilled them.

The next step is to mate the two halves of the center section again, but I don’t want to use the close tolerance bolts. A few builders have bought plain bolts at the hardware store. That’s what I’m planning on doing tomorrow. I’m setting the center fuselage aside for now.

Seems like I haven’t had any time to work on the project this week. I was out of town one day, and just too beat tired the next. And even today I spent time on other stuff like raking leaves, blowing air through the sprinkler system, changing the oil in the compressor, etc.

I managed to do a few things on the plane. I finished riveting the nut plates on the seat ribs, and then put the whole center fuselage assembly back together again, including the bottom skin. The fit is a bit tight in places, but good overall. I fabricated the weird attach strips for the baggage corner ribs. Those things seem like a total after-thought. It seems like they could have been fabricated so that the attach strips aren’t needed.

After staring at the plans a while, I noticed some other snap bushing holes I need to drill out. I’ll take care of that after I take the assembly apart again. I also don’t have the seat belt brackets attached quite yet. According to Dan’s site, they need to be removed later anyway for skin riveting access. However, I noticed that I need to trim still more off of the brackets in order to clear the seat rib flanges.

Started riveting nut plates to the seat ribs.

More prep work on the aft fuselage. Deburred the rest of the stiffeners and dimpled them. Also dimpled the last bulkhead.

Dimpled a few more bulkheads and started deburring the stiffeners for the aft fuselage.

Deburred more of the aft fuselage parts, and started dimpling the bulkheads. From the comments I’ve seen on several web sites, I did a trial fit of a longeron into the slot on the bulkheads. Sure enough, it doesn’t fit. I filed the slot a tiny bit wider.

Disassembled the aft fuselage and started deburring the parts.

Etched and primed all of the seat and baggage ribs. This was probably the worst painting session yet. The paint gun has been giving me more and more trouble lately. I cleaned it out twice while painting, and it kept clogging up. Well, I finally took more of it apart and discovered a screen inside it that was really clogged up. I cleaned that out along with all the other parts, and the gun works like new now.

The other problem was the weather. It never outright rained, but it kept sprinkling every 20 minutes or so. I had to keep running everything inside, wait for the sprinkles to stop, and then take everything back out and continue. Luckily the paint I’m using is water based, so the few rain drops that did fall on the parts didn’t ruin the paint job. It’s good enough for primer.