I had an excellent time away over a super long Labor Day weekend getaway with some wonderful people. It certainly made it easier to be away from the RV (as easy as that can be of course). I took an overnight red eye to get home and was pretty jet… Read More »Welcome home riveting hour (100th hour!)
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 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
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 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… Read More »Horizontal stabilizer done right
I have to start by glowing once more about how well the priming turned out. Working with all these primed parts has been so easy and I am glad that I waited to dimple until after the priming. I can now see how everyone says it is more difficult to… Read More »Dimples and first rivets
Time to prime at long last! Today was the day that I was waiting for for over 2 weeks. In retrospect I am kind of glad it took this long because it enabled me to finish up all of the pieces for both the vertical stabilizer and the rudder. This… Read More »Priming Party!
Only a few more hours of work to get the rudder finished up as far as I can before priming. I am still holding to my decision to not dimple until after the parts are primed so we will continue to see how that holds up after the first prime… Read More »Rudder – Part 4
I like the plan of moving on to the rudder so far – I think it has been a good call. In fact, it has been an excellent move because the replacement primer was supposed to arrive yesterday and UPS sent me a notice today saying that it was damaged… Read More »Rudder Part 2
No progress on the plane for a few days here, but I did take the time to do a lot of research into what other people have done during their builds to help with the overall feel and flow of the project. After watching countless videos and reading forums until… Read More »Travel for work June 2-6