I am incredibly lucky that my parts came this morning already. Next day service?!? I’ll take that! Thanks Van’s! I wasn’t counting on being able to get this done before I left for a long weekend for a family reunion. But here we go!
For as frustrated and deflated as I felt yesterday after botching those brackets, I have turned a complete 180 degrees back to feeling confident and amazing. There really is no feeling quite like making the decision that poor quality won’t be accepted and going back to make a vastly superior part instead. It felt great honestly and I got a new shop vac out of the deal (Home Depot man… that place gets me every time).
Here they are! Nothing else really to show for my efforts today as I spent a lot of time working around the house, then setting up for the new fabrication, measuring, and going slowly and deliberately on these new parts. Using my calipers I validated that these parts are well within 1/64th of an inch of specification all the way around and are identical in every way (except mirrored of course). Incredibly pleased.
The only other thing I did today was clean up with my new shop vac and put together a new little rivet storage device I picked up at Home Depot. I got tired of going to Bag 1101 (or whatever) and cross-referencing it with the shipping list from Van’s. Now I have each rivet type labeled and stored in a tower case for easy access and use.
Total time today = 2.5 hours
Total time empennage = 49 hours
Total time aircraft = 49 hours