Tag: Empennage

Oh man, this was a TON of riveting. My previous sections didn’t have this many rivets, but it was very rewarding! After I got caught up and then some on Friday after work, I really dug in all day Saturday and a little bit on Sunday. This was all riveting the entire time, starting from the front spar, to the stringers, to the skin outwards and then finally to the rear spar. It was really fun and there were a few things I learned along the way.

The main issue I encountered was when I was going to rivet the LP4-3 blind rivets for the rear spar to the mid ribs. The middle rivet was fine, but the outside ones were too close to the flange for me to get a straight shot with the rivet guns I had. I decided to keep moving and deal with it later. When I opened the drawer to get another tool, I saw the dies for the blind dimpling tool. I realized that if I stacked then together, I could then create enough space to get my riveting gun in there!

I was super exhausted after working on this so much on Friday and Saturday. I spent a total of 15 hours and 15 minutes on it this weekend to wrap it up. I’m super excited that I’ve continued to hone my skills with this portion of the build and I’m ready to get on to the elevators! During my breaks tomorrow with work I’m going to go into the attic to gather all of the parts and bring them down to the garage.

It has been a long while since I last worked on the plane. I’ve not had much time and I probably need to see how best to use an hour here and there to do this build. I had a good three hours today (11/19/2021) so I got after it. I left this off when I riveted the nose ribs into place and got the front spar riveted. I then noticed that I did not fully rivet two nose ribs and I would have to remove the front spar to get to them again. I drilled out most of those rivets but that is where I left it in June. That was three hours worth of work there.

Fast forward to tonight and I fixed my mistake with the unriveted nose ribs and got back to where I was plus some. I got a good row of rivets done on the front spar flange to the skin. Tomorrow I will have quite a bit of time and I Hope to complete the front spar flange riveting and hopefully start on riveting the mid-rib flanges.

I did make a discovery on these two different mushroom rivet heads. The one surrounded with rubber requires quite a bit of force to seat the head to the skin. I’ve found it easier to use the standard mushroom head to get some decent looking rivets that are very flush with the skin.

Here are the results of tonight’s work.

I did quite a bit of work over this weekend. I finished all of the deburring on Friday night (6/11/2021) and got everything ready for priming the next morning. I primed all of the parts and then while the paint cured we went and look at travel trailers with the kids. I think while I’m building this and we have more kids than we can fly in the RV-10, we will travel around the US in a travel trailer, but we are going to rent one first to see if it’s really for us. So we’ll see!

After it cured, I put together the inner rib and spar assembly and I got almost all of the nose ribs installed. I have two more nose ribs to rivet into the nose and then I can get the inner rib and spar assembly riveted in place. My biggest worry is how to rivet all of the inner rib rivets. That will be a tight area to get those rivets set so fingers crossed I can get that done without too much of a hassle.

I spent the majority of this weekend getting the HS put together, final drilling the holes, and then I deburred the outside holes of the skin. I did have to order a tight quarters drilling set. I tried using a right angle drill attachment from Northern Tools but it was still too wide to get into the very corners where the HS-1015 stringer lives. So I’ll have to wait for that to arrive before I can disassemble the HS and finish the deburring. I might still move ahead to the deburring and just put the parts connected to the stringer back together, but I’m not sure though. Either way, it was really cool to see the whole thing together and to see how it is constructed!

Tonight was all about getting prepped for my next big day of contiguous time. I’m busy the next couple of days with church activities so I wanted to get these done today so I’m ready to go next time. It wasn’t too difficult to hack these out luckily.

It was a really good Memorial Day this year. We didn’t get to go outside since it rained all day long, but we did watch the PBS Memorial Day Concert on YouTube. It definitely touches my heart to remember all of what has been sacrificed for our country to stay free. From the people who gave the ultimate sacrifice, to the medical personnel, and even those who support the war efforts from home. Every single one has given a sacrifice or time, blood, sweat, and tears. It was a really good day of reflection.

I did take some opportunity while I was watching some shows today to finish the deburring of the last parts for the HS. It didn’t mention to deburr them but I felt I might as well get it done now while I have all the deburring equipment out. It was about two hours worth of work today.

I did run across an interesting issue. In the instructions, it asks you to cut an oblong hole in two of the nose ribs for the trim cables to go through. My nose ribs already had lightening holes in them and I measure the holes and they covered the area of the oblong hole that they wanted us to cut so I’m going to guess it’s no longer required. I’ll keep searching for an answer and if not I’ll contact Van’s just to make doubly sure.

Edit: I just realized that I had not posted my previous days of working on the deburring, fluting, and straightening of the other horizontal stabilizer ribs. I’ve added those images here and the time here as well. It took me almost 8 total hours to get all of this done due to the tight areas and the flanges.

Now that I’m done with the rudder, I immediately started back on the horizontal stabilizer again. I pulled all of the parts out and did a ton of drilling, countersinking, deburring, and prep work. I should have documented better during this process but I was just jamming away while doing this. Below are the pictures from the work with comments below them. Luckily I’ve started getting the priming down. I lowered the pressure to 50 psi and it really smoothed out the paint. I did have to slow down during some of this because I got my second COVID shot and I started feeling pretty lethargic and tired. Either way, enjoy!