Yup, with the sole exception of dimpling the skins and finishing the edges, there’s nothing left but riveting.

I was able to get an early start today; I had some medical stuff to take care of in the afternoon, and wasn’t sure how long it would take, so I took half a day off work.  Once I got home, it was straight into the garage and down to business.  First order was to dimple all the skeleton parts, which didn’t take long.  Then it was out to the driveway for some quality time spent cleaning and scuffing all those parts.  Of course, about this time I could hear a good old Georgia summer thunderstorm moving in, so I ended up moving the parts into the garage so they could dry.  

Luckily, the storm barely skirted us.  Clearing skies and a look at the radar confirmed that it looked like I’d have a good window for priming, and it indeed worked out well.  A couple hours later, I had a bunch of nice primed parts.  In the meantime, between primer coats and with some help from Josie, the vinyl came off the skins and all those rivet holes were deburred. (she also relieved me while I was dimpling earlier; with just a hand squeezer, the old forearms get a bit weary after a while)

I guess tomorrow the real fun starts!

Prepped parts drying in the driveway.  Gotta love my “custom” hitch-haul drying rack…

“Please rivet me!  Please!!!”

Well, overall this was a surprisingly unproductive weekend, at least as far as the plane was concerned.  I pretty much procrastinated myself out of my available work time on Saturday.  Today Josie was doing a NASCAR driving thing at Atlanta Motor Speedway, so I tagged along to watch the fun and get pictures.  This was after we got up at 7 AM to watch the MotoGP race, and then met her family for breakfast.  By the time we got back, a nap was definitely in order, but then we got out in the garage and got to work.

Nothing stunning really; I finished all the drilling on the starboard h-stab while Josie got to work deburring all the numerous holes in the port h-stab skeleton.  By the time the night was over, everything was drilled and deburred, ready for cleaning and priming.  Side note: there are, um,  a lot of holes to be deburred in that skeleton.  I’m writing this mostly so that I can look back and laugh at myself when I’m working on the wings, at which point I’ll presumably learn a new definition for “a lot of holes.”

Got a late start tonight after going out for dinner with Josie.  I did, however, get my angle drill in, so I was able to continue working right where I left off.  First up were the tasks requiring the angle drill: drilling the rivet holes between HS-404, HS-702, HS 810/814, and HS-405.  These were a piece of cake with the new angle drill.  From there, I finished drilling/match-drilling all the skin-skeleton holes.  Then everything came apart, I drilled the last eight holes in the outboard ends of the spar reinforcements, and that was that!

By this time, it was going on 10:00, and I’d been at it for 90 minutes.  I figured that completing the other stab would keep me out there until 11:30, at which point the neighbors might not appreciate the constant sound of spinning air drills and a running compressor.  Plus I have to get up early in the morning for the EAA 690 breakfast.

I did notice an issue as I was taking the port stab apart, and a look at the starboard stab showed the same issue.  The forward most holes between HS-405 and the skins are all a little tight on minimum edge distance.  I don’t see how I could have done this any differently, though… those holes are drilled using prepunched holes in the skin as drill guides, and the rib is further positioned quite positively off the rear spar channel.  There doesn’t seem to be any way that rib could have been shifed forward to allow for proper edge distance.  A touch of research seems to indicate that this is a common problem, and that the universal advice from Van’s amounts to “build on!”  But I’m sort of a nervous Nellie, so I think I’ll ask the folks over at VAF just to be sure.  Worst case, I think I could shore things up by adding an additional rivet without a lot of fanfare.

Bad edge distance!  BAD!!!

Short work night.  Not because I’m busy, but because it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought to get to the point where I had to stop and wait for a new tool to arrive.

Last night, I assembled all the parts of the port h-stab skeleton and skin, and did all the match-drilling up to the point the instructions called for an angle drill, which I didn’t have.  The drill was ordered from Spruce today, but work didn’t have to stop…I still had to repeat all these steps on the starboard stab.  So that’s what I worked on tonight.  It actually went really fast, and before long I was stuck yet again.

Luckily, I got the ship notification from Spruce just a bit ago, so I should have the drill tomorrow and be able to jump right back into things after work.

In the meantime…well, the instructions certainly don’t call for temporarily assembling the entire h-stab right now, but how I could I resist the opportunity to spend ten minutes adding a few clecos and ending up with something I could stare at while cackling madly?  I figure there’s some value in detours like this that help remind you that yes, you are going to end up with airplane-type stuff eventually.  Motivation, I tell you…

In our last installment, I’d freshly mangled some additional sheetmetal while attempting to back rivet stiffeners to the rudder skin.  Lest we forget, the whole reason I skipped ahead to the v-stab and then rudder was because I fouled up some parts fot eh h-stab and had to order replacements.  Since I’m now waiting on some more stuff from Avery to continue with the rudder, I decided to go back to what I’m supposed to be working on first anyway…yeah, the h-stab.

I screwed up the tapers on the forward spar reinforcements by trying to rough cut them with a hacksaw, and then fine-tune with a belt sander and the scotchbrite wheel.  This time, I decided to go ahead and acquire the tool I should have used in the first place: a bandsaw.  A trip to Lowe’s this morning took care of that, and after some time getting the thing set up, I did some test cuts using the ruined spar angles and…man, this thing cuts through aluminum like butter.  Very nice.

So I got out my replacement reinforcements, laid out the cut lines, and had them trimmed down in no time with the bandsaw.  Some cleanup and corner rounding on the scotchbrite wheel, and I had them done in no time.  Yep, having the right tools really does make all the difference.  Next up was bending the “ears” of the reinforcements.  Seems like I’ve read where some other builders approached this with great trepidation, but I honestly thought it was pretty easy.  Clamp them in the vice, tap with the dead blow hammer, check angle, repeat until done.  Easy as pie.  Bending the flanges on the HS-702 forward spar channels was even easier.

The next step was the cut the HS-805 main nose ribs.  These attach to the forward spar where the reinforcement angles lie, so some relief cuts need to be made for them to fit around the reinforcement pieces.  Here again, the band saw was wonderful; after using a drill to create the corner radius of the cut, the bandsaw took care of the rest in no time.  Again, a little scotchbrite wheel action finished things up.

Now it’s time to really get serious.  Out came the rest of ribs for the h-stab; they all had to be edge finished and the fluted.  Lots of little nooks and crannies to be taken care of, but I’m starting to get a system in place for handling ribs.  Next, I decided which ribs would be for the left/right side of the plane (or port and starboard, as I prefer…no ambiguity there like L/R), and then it was time to do some clecoing.  The portside stab skeleton went together easily, then I match-drilled the holes.  The inner main ribs, HS-804/805, aren’t predrilled, though.  The skin has to be clecoed on, and then the ribs are drilled using the skin as a guide.  That, too, was straightforward and went well.

The next step was to cleco on the forward spar reinforcements, and then holes have to be drilled through a bunch of pieces at once; namely, the HS-804 main rib, HS-702 spar channel, and the spar reinforcement.  The main problem here is that there isn’t a lot of space at all to work with.  The instructions recommend an angle drill, but mention that a long drill bit can be used as well.  I do have a long drill bit, but after considering the situation it still seemed like a setup for disaster.  I’m thinking it’s better to play it safe and go ahead and snag an angle drill.  In the meantime, I’ve still got a lot of steps to repeat on the other h-stab half, so there’s no shortage of work while I order the angle drill and wait on delivery.  In a way, this builds on the lesson with the band saw: sure, you can get stuff done with subpar tools, but it’s more work and there’s a lot more chance for stuff to go awry.  Right now, I’d like to have stuff go well, hence the decision to order the right tool instead of trying to MacGyver it.

Anyways, by the time I hit this point, it was after 7 PM and I was getting hungry.  I did some internet research, which confirmed that I wasn’t going to buy a worthwhile angle drill locally. (unless I went to Spruce, an hour away and undoubtedly closed)  Josie wanted to watch a movie, so I called it a night.  Tomorrow evening, I hope to work on the starboard h-stab half and get it to the point where I need the angle drill as well.  That should be here Friday, so I can pick right back up after work then.  At this rate, I should be able to have the skeleton riveted together this weekend, and before long it’ll be skin riveting time…

Properly tapered spar reinforcements:

And now they’re bent:

Hey, that looks like an airplane part:

*sigh*

Obviously, work output on this project has gone down quite a bit.  I’ve been out of town two of the past three weekends, with all the associated planning.  Outside of that, now that it’s starting to heat up outside, it’s been a little difficult to motivate myself to go work in a marginally-air-conditioned garage.  But those are still excuses; I could work past this stuff, I just…haven’t.  Today, however, I resolved that I was finally going to get back in the swing of things.  On the docket was back riveting the rudder stiffeners.  If there was one thing I was sure I could do well, it was back riveting.  Back when I did the EAA workshop, I pretty much set every rivet perfectly using this method.

Of course, I should have learned by now that the worst thing I can do is go into a task thinking it’s going to be a breeze.  It’s as if the cosmos detects my overconfidence and delivers the smack-down of failure.  Honestly, it’s kind of getting a bit old.

But anyway…things started out fine, not that there’s much challenge in dropping a metric buttload of AND426-3-3.5 rivets into skin holes and covering them with rivet tape.  I then flipped the skin over, carefully placed the first row of rivets on the back rivet plate, laid the stiffener in place, put the rivet gun with back rivet set in place, gave it a short flurry of taps, and removed the gun to find…a beautifully clinched shop head.  ARGH!

Huh, I sure thought I was holding the gun straight.  Might as well move on down the line and come back to that botched rivet later.  The next rivet, I very deliberately put the gun in place, gave it a few taps, stopped to take a look, then gave it a longer blast…then gazed in black wonder at yet another clinched shop head.  I then repeated the feat a third time in a row.

Rivets too long maybe?  I had previously double-checked the callout on the plans, but something must be amiss.  Surely this couldn’t just be a case of operator error…out came the calipers.  Nope, rivet shank length was pretty much dead on the required 1.5D.

At this point, it was creeping up on 10 PM. (I got a late start)  Not wanting to disturb the neighbors with more riveting, I decided to drill out the botched rivets and call it a night.  Which I did, enlarging all three skin holes in the process.

*sigh*

Some research mentioned the possibility of the back rivet set being worn, and upon inspection, it does seem like the set is able to wobble around quite a bit in the nylon collar.  Might be normal, might not be, but hey, a new set is under $30 from Avery.  Might as well add that on so long as I’m ordering some “oops” rivets for my newly-enlarged holes.

I’m not at the point of surrender by any means, or anything like that, but the constant stream of mistakes is getting a little old.  Then again, this is why you start with the relatively inexpensive empennage kit, I guess.

Still here.  Some busy times here, between some vehicular issues and going out of town this past weekend.  I didn’t have a ton of time tonight, but I wanted to get out in the garage and do something.  Luckily, I had a nice, easy task to perform: dimpling, prepping, and priming the rudder stiffeners.  Last time, I had miscut a couple stiffeners, but after contacting Van’s, it turns out they’re still usable, so I went ahead with them instead of ordering more new stuff.  Beyond that, the day was pretty simple.

I did make one little mistake: Since I was trying to wrap things up, I didn’t wait long enough between cleaning the stiffeners and priming them.  Even though I blew them off with the air gun, there was apparently still some moisture present, as the primer bubbled up in a couple places.  So I guess I’ll have to go back and sand/reprime some areas tomorrow.

No pics today, sorry.

Short day in the shop-didn’t have a lot of free time tonight.  Match-drilled the stiffeners to the skins, then removed them and deburred all the holes.

There was also some more fun.  As I was trimming the stiffeners last night, I kept thinking it was really odd that the topmost stiffeners were sort of “backwards” from all the others.  Earlier today, I briefly walked out to the garage to check things out, and noticed that those same stiffeners looked to have too much material on the leading edge end.  I set the spar in place, and yep…they were going to need more trimming.  I thought it was especially odd that they didn’t fit quite right in addition to being different from all the others.

It was about four hours later that I had a sudden epiphany.  Another trip to the garage confirmed it-I had tapered the wrong end of those two stiffeners.  Argh.  Luckily, it appears that I’ll still be able to use them; in fact, I went ahead and trimmed them some more this evening so they’ll fit.  I’m a bit concerned about the amount of material on the tapered end of these two stiffeners, so I’ve submitted the question to the bright folks over at the VAF forums.  I might call the folks at Van’s as well to see if this is an issue.  Stiffener material is pretty cheap, but it would be kind of annoying since I just ordered some parts from them.

So, as noted last time, I’ve been having some trouble with the front spar of the v-stab.  Since then, I once again convinced myself that I could make those rivets good if I was really, really, really careful.  So a couple nights ago, I went down and made another try.  And clinched them both.  Again.  In the process of drilling them out, the drill bit slipped off a couple times and made some divots in the nose rib flange.  I’d already put a couple nicks in before, which I’d duly sanded out and reprimed.  At this point, all those nicks were making me nervous.  And I still hadn’t ordered replacements for the h-stab reinforcements, so after seeing how cheap the replacement nose rib was, I elected to get a new one.  So now all three of my replacement parts are on the way.  And I’m even more convinced that I need another set of experienced eyes on these two pesky rivets.

In the meantime, I didn’t want to just sit around doing nothing…so I decided to start work on the rudder.  I poked through the directions for the rudder, and was going to attempt to gather all the parts together, but then I realized that there are a few parts for the rudder that have to fabricated from raw sheet stock.  So I decided to keep it simple, follow the directions by starting on the stiffeners, and worry about the other stuff later.

Making stiffeners is pretty straightforward, just kind of tedious.  They come as long pieces that have to be trimmed to length.  A bandsaw might have made this faster, but I don’t have one…so it was snips all the way.  By the time I had all the raw cuts done, my right hand was feeling a bit worn out.  Next up was to clean up the rough cuts from the snips using the handy old scotchbrite wheel.  After a lot of shaping and deburring, I had some finished stiffeners, which I proceeded to cleco to the rudder skin.  By this time, it was after 11, so I decided to match-drill another day.

Some fun notes: One might note from the following photos that I left the blue vinyl on while trimming the stiffeners.  This was kind of dumb; if I’d pulled the stuff off before trimming, I would have had (I think) 10 sheets to pull off.  Instead, I had 32 sheets to pull off.  Oops.  Also, there was a moment of crisis while I was smoothing the rough-cut stiffeners on the grinder.  I went to grab the next stiffener, and realized…there was one missing.  I searched all over the garage.  I couldn’t imagine where that thing could possible have gone.  I was completely confused.  Then I found it…under another, longer stiffener.  Completely concealed.  That cost me about 20 minutes of doubting my sanity…

It had to happen sometime.  The introduction section of the RV-8 preview plans contains this statement: “The project you are about to undertake will probably be the most frustrating, time-consuming, enjoyable, fulfilling, and rewarding you have ever experienced.”  I knew frustration was a part of the deal, but it’s still…well, frustrating when it happens.

When we left off last time, I’d failed miserably at bucking the center rivet for the v-stab front spar and two ribs.  Since then, I did manage to get that rivet drilled out without destroying anything, but I hadn’t done anything else.  I did order a new squeezer with a 3″ yoke, figuring that would be helpful for situations like this.  Today, I went out to the garage, confident in the knowledge that with my shiny new tool, I’d make short work of these three rivets and move on to skinning the v-stab.

The good news was that the new squeezer with the 3″ yoke could easily reach that center rivet.  The bad news was that even so, working inside those two ribs didn’t offer a lot of clearance.  If you’d asked me before today, I would have told you that squeezing rivets was pretty much idiot-proof.  I got to eat my own words when the first rivet I squeezed had a lovely clinched head.  Blarg.  Drill-out time returns!  Attempt #3 went better, as I paid a lot more attention to making absolutely sure the squeezer was straight.  I suspect that the flex in that 3″ yoke aggravates less-than-optimal positioning…

But now, I was happy!  With that pesky center rivet set, the other two would surely be a cakewalk!  Actually, no…there’s even less clearance for those two.  And what with the spar web and rib flanges all over the place, I still can’t get at them with my old squeezer.  My first attempt at squeezing one of the end rivets…yet ANOTHER clinched head.  Josie, who was helping me out at the time, suggested I try to hit the other end one before drilling out the first, maybe as a sort of confidence booster.  My confidence was not boosted, however…even though I was being extremely careful positioning the squeezer, the shop head on that rivet started to lean over as well.  At that point, I summoned all my willpower to avoid flinging a tool across the garage, and stalked into the house, turning off the A/C and lights in the garage.  The last thing I wanted to do at that point was to look at that spar again.

After about an hour of sulking, I’d formulated a plan that made me want to go out and play some more.  I’d dispense with the pesky squeezer, and go back to the rivet gun.  Surely if I was really, really, really, really careful, I could buck those two rivets and be done with this, right?  Of course!  So I went back out, drilled out the two offending rivets, spent a good half-hour setting the work up, clamping everything down, thinking through how I’d approach things, experimenting with how to hold the rivet gun and bucking bar, etc.  This was possibly the most preplanned rivet-bucking I’d ever done.  Finally, I was convinced I was ready.  I carefully started the rivet with a few taps.  It didn’t seem to be leaning over, so I gave it a little burst, still being very careful to hold the bucking bar square.  And there, once again, the shop head was leaning to the side.

I wanted to assault that spar with a ball-peen hammer until I had turned it into scrap aluminum, or some kind of modern art masterpiece.  Instead, I just gave up on it.  I’m going to have to swallow my pride and get some experienced assistance on this one.

In an attempt to salvage some kind of progress from the day, I decided to dimple the v-stab skin.  I just wanted some kind of achievement for the day. (besides perfecting my rivet drill-out procedure)  That went well, mostly…except for the nice figure-eight dimple I made.  As far as I can tell, that’s a rite of passage for builders.  Guess I’m in the club now.  At least fixes for figure-eight holes are pretty well-documented, so I’m not all that bummed about it.  Or maybe it just seems so minor compared to the continuing frustration with that spar.

In retrospect, one source of the great frustration is the expectations I put upon myself.  I was convinced that by the end of today, I’d have a skinned v-stab to look at, that I would achieved a nice build milestone…my first complete, recognizable aircraft part.  I didn’t allow for setbacks, and when they did occur, it was like my hopes and dreams were torpedoed.

I guess it’s time to get familiar with some of the EAA folks I’ve been seeing at the pancake breakfasts, and start politely imposing on their free time…