Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

Julie was awesome today and helped a ton on the fuselage riveting. The fuselage has taken much longer than I thought it would. There are just so many different surfaces that need riveting and so many complicated areas like the corner ribs.

One area that was particular tricky is the curve in the bend at the corner rib. There are tabs from the aft fuselage that really need to be bent out a ways. I didn’t pre-bend them enough. I tried the trick of putting some rubber washers around the rivet so the bucking bar would hold down the tab, but that didn’t work too well. It turned out the tabs are large enough that I could use a screwdriver to hold down the tab and still get the bucking bar on the rivet. It also helped when Julie held the rivet gun perpendicular to the surface right around that particular rivet. It’s harder than it sounds since the skin curves right there.

We just about finished the whole thing except for just a few tricky rivets around the corner ribs. After shooting those and squeezing some rib to bulkhead rivets, this thing will be ready to flip!

I riveted some more of the seat backs together. They are almost done at this point.

Julie helped me with some fuselage riveting today. We riveted all of the bottom skin stiffeners and some of the lower longerons.

I went to rivet the seatbacks together and noticed that I completely forgot to prime one side of the angles. I took care of that and did some deburring on some miscellaneous parts while waiting for that to dry.

I did most of the riveting on the seat backs using the squeezer. Of course I started putting the rivets in the wrong direction. After 6 or so rivets, I noticed I had the shop head on the front side. It’s purely cosmetic, but I wanted the manufactured head on the front. It was easy enough to drill them out and reset them. The seat backs have a lot of parts that are not necessarily in the most intuitive orientation. It takes some concentration to avoid putting things together wrong.

Painted the seat back and bellcrank parts.

While checking out the fuselage, I realized there are a few thing I could do solo. I squeezed the rivets along the longeron from the F-902 to F-705 bulkhead. I examined the plans several times to confirm that this is the area that needs rivets now. The rest of the rivets are left for later when top skins are added.

There are some “keeper” rivets along the longeron that hold things together temporarily until the top skins are put on. I squeezed those as well.

Scuffed and washed the seat back and bellcrank parts in preparation for painting.

Since I’m going to be priming some parts for the seat backs soon, I decided to get some other parts ready. I drilled and deburred the parts for the elevator bellcrank.