We had a gorgeous morning to prime today. I woke up with Anne as she had an early flight out and just headed down to the garage to get everything set up for spraying the primer. As always, one of the most time consuming and dirty tasks of priming is… Read More »Priming the elevator parts
It is always nice to be reminded of the reason you undertake a challenge such as building an airplane, and today was one of those days. Even in the face of monotonous deburring, having my family around to help out not only took the edge off (deburring pun! Boom!) but… Read More »Bring in the deburring experts
It was inevitable – the match drilling marathon began. Van’s recommends keeping every single hole clecoed on the front and rear spars of the elevator while you are match drilling the skins. This means pulling out a cleco, drilling the hole, marking it as drilled, replacing the cleco, then moving… Read More »Match drilling
Not a whole lot to write about, but I jumped out to the garage for an hour just to keep the momentum going. I was able to get the elevator horns installed as well as the trailing edge pieces cut to size and deburred for both sides of the elevator.… Read More »Quick Sunday session
After a long week of not being able to put too much time into the plane, I was able to really hunker down this weekend and set my hands to the elevators. I was pretty much able to get them completely assembled and match drilled (but not the skins –… Read More »Elevator Day
Today was quite the marathon day. The family went out to run a bunch of errands so I got to put in a full day out in the garage. It was excellent. I would have probably got a lot more done if I did not end up spending 45 minutes… Read More »Finish up horizontal stabilizer and start elevators
Pictures don’t do it a great deal of justice because the dimples appear to be WAY more warped than they are. These skins actually feel almost flawless – I’m certainly happy with how this surface is turning out. I have now finished all of the forward spar flange rivets and… Read More »Guess what!?! More riveting
Today I had to use the phrase, “Hey babe – will you come here and help me find out where I’m bleeding from?” Yup. Picture below. Some some blood pooling on the manual (and I spared you the image of the larger section – this is just to give you… Read More »Riveting like a madman
I have begun one of the most significant sections I have come across yet on the plane and that is the completion of the horizontal stabilizer. I knew that there were going to be a lot of rivets because I spent so much tie drilling, deubrring, and dimpling all of… Read More »Dimple and rivet the horizontal stabilizer
Once again, not a terrifyingly exciting evening, but one that definitely saw some progress. I was able to spend several hours out just dimpling and getting all of the parts ready to go for final assembly. I also spent a good deal of time just reading the manual making sure… Read More »Dimpling the horizontal stabilizer