I got the rest of the hinges drilled today as well as the shim dimpled and the hinges countersunk. All I have to do tomorrow is rivet all of this together and this section will be done. Should be roughly another hour.
Blog
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Top Cowl Hinges Drilled
I got all of the hinges cut and put in place with their initial drilled holes. It then took me the rest of tonight’s time to get the top hinges done because they are pretty stiff and didn’t want to conform to the tight bend. I’m going to imagine they want us to bend that to relieve the stress because once I rivet that to the fiberglass cowling it will deform it, where the body has alot more structure to hold its shape. Either way, if it doesn’t I will bend it so it doesn’t deform it.
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Cowl Hinges and Shims Prepped
I am needing to spend more time here for the foreseeable future studying for my commercial checkride. So I’ll still be spending time building but I’m going to have to limit it some. I got the hinges and the shims for them cut today. These will go along the firewall and will attach the cowl to the fuselage.
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Upper Forward Fuselage Fully Attached & Front Seats Installed
Brendon and I got the ~30 rivets done to finish the upper forward fuselage install. I decided to go ahead and complete the panel installation for everything as well as the seats just to see how it all fits together. I’ve also decided I’m going to do the full piano wire installation as the manual describes rather than the Skybolts. The Skybolts are expensive and it seems like according to the forums and pictures I’ve taken from different RV-10s I’ve seen at Airventure that it is a 50/50 split on piano hinge or Skybolts. So I’m just going to go with what I’ve already purchased and is in the instructions. I’ll get started with that on Monday.
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Upper Forward Fuselage Almost Attached
I went ahead and started working on getting the upper forward fuselage attached today. I attached the 9 LP4-3 rivets but when I went to start riveting the ribs to the firewall I noticed that the middle rib was out of alignment. Come to find out the bend in the tab on the F-1044B was bent to far forward. So I had to remove those rivets, fix the bend to the proper 149 degree bend at the right point and then remount it all. Luckily it wasn’t terrible work but work I didn’t want to have to do twice. I got almost all of the rivets done alone the skin but my son is having a party today so I decided to wait for tomorrow to get him inside and buck the rivets on the inside. I just need to do the five skin rivets on the forward side and then the rib rivets so it shouldn’t take more than an hour at most.
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Tires Mounted & ELT Rivets Finished
The new rivet gun arrived from Amazon this morning. It has a very low profile nose and worked pretty good. I had to use it not only for the ELT mount but also for the upper forward fuselage attachment and it worked great each time. I decided to go ahead and mount the tires so that it is taking up less space on my table.
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ELT (almost) Installed
I decided to go ahead and get the ELT installed since I have all of that ready to go. It went well up until I started pulling the rivets at the top. The first one got stuck in my rivet gun. This thing is pictured above the place it went; in the TRASH! This is the last time I buy Arrow products as I’ve had nothing but problems with them either from my staple guns or now this rivet gun. I’ll have to see if I can find one tomorrow that’s from a brand name I can trust that still has a small enough head on it to reach in tight areas. That’s the whole reason I bought this one was because the head was pretty small. Either way, I got the bottom four rivets pulled and I just need to pull the top rivets so for all intents and purposes this ELT is installed as it won’t take me more than 5 minutes to pull those top rivets.
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Brake Lines Finally Finished!
I decided I was going to get this work done today no matter what. I honestly feel I’m going to end up coming back here to replace these lines. It just seems to wrong that these lines take so much effort to install. I know quite a few of the guys on the forum use custom made braided lines which I am probably going to do the same if these start leaking.
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Rudder and Elevator Servos Installed & Controls Adjusted
This is going to be a couple posts just so I can track my time properly across sections, but I got the servos installed for the controls. Luckily it wasn’t too terrible but it is a tight area. I then got the control column measurement tool cut and made so I could adjust everything. I had to adjust a little bit to get the control tubes to meet the length I needed. Luckily I still had plenty of room left on the threads to get this to happen. Even though this isn’t in the controls section, I put the RTV on the scat tube as they requested. I was already seeing chafing around the fuel selector and the screw holes that are right next to it. I pretty much slathered it on in those areas as well as along the top where the center channel cover will go so that there will be some material to save the scat tube for a bit to come. I am going to have to put that on my yearly inspection list so I can make sure that that scat tube is still in good shape.
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Seat Rails Completely Installed & Garmin Servos
I got the Garmin servos in today. I just need to install them tomorrow and then I can finish the controls section as well. But the seat rails are finally fully installed. I found that I had actually bent some of the nutplates and broken some of the rivets. I fixed all of it and everything is good to go now. I’ll install the seats later after I’ve verified I don’t need under the seats anymore (which will probably be right after I get the airplane up on its landing gear).
