Rudder assembly

Once you get the rudder assembled then there's a whole bunch of match drilling.






Preparing the trailing edge is kind of tricky.  The problem is that you drill it perpendicular to the rudder chord line, but countersink it perpendicular to the rudder skin.  The pilot on the countersink bit wants to follow the hole.  I sweated this a lot until doing some research and finding out you can just hold it in your hand and countersink.  When you hold the wedge in your hand, the existing hole in the wedge will force the countersink bit at the wrong angle for a little bit, but then you can put a little force on the wedge and get the correct countersink angle to remove the rest of the material.  From what I read online, it doesn't have to be perfect.  I think mine came out pretty good, will see once its riveted together.
Oh - and one sneaky thing in the plans.  They call out a part number for the wedge that isn't in the inventory list.  The number you use is listed in the figure. Took me more time than I'll admit to figure that out.



Then you pull it all apart again and commence deburring.  There's probably 500 holes in this thing, and each gets deburred 4 times.





Finally primed the whole works.  I'm getting better at this, but it still takes a while.  The most time consuming part is scotchbrite scrubbing every part.  Results were better this time because I learned to blow-dry every piece before bringing it to the paint booth.





Then it all starts going back together. First is some spar reinforcements and nutplates.




Then back-riveting the stiffeners to the skins.  Back riveting is awesome, it leaves the manufactured head ultra-flush on the skin.




Getting that aft rivet set on the top rib is a little bit tricky.  Here's how I did it, worked great.  Found a air hammer chisel to stick in there, elevated the back end of it with a squeezer yoke I had laying around.  Then hold it steady and hit the chisel with the rivet gun.  Like butta.

Rudder Frame

Making progress on the rudder.

These stiffeners have to be cut out using the band saw then assembled.

Then you cleco them to the rudder spar:



Next goes on 1 skin and the trailing edge wedge.  You can see the wedge in here, at the trailing end of the skin with alternating small and big holes.  I had a freakout in that the plans called for that trailing edge to be part number R-1006, but I could not find that in my inventory sheet.  Finally figured out that lower in the diagram it gives you the real part number VA-140.  Normally the lower part of the spar would have a rib too, thats the one I'm still waiting on Vans for.

First screw up

Match drilled the rudder horn to the lower rib, but the clecos must not have cinched down all the way before I drilled.  Now there's a gap on one side.  Left like this, the rudder will be deflected a couple degrees just on the bottom.  So I've emailed Van's, guessing a need a new R-1004A/B.  Crap.



**UPDATE**
Vans got back to me and said that I could either add a doubler on the other side to "sandwich" the part with elongated holes, or just buy a new one.  I need some Proseal anyway, so I spent the $9.25 for the new R-1004 rib.

I might have a half hour in prep time into it, oh well.  If this is the worst of my screw ups, I'll be a happy camper.

Finished Vertical Stab

Vertical Stabilizer skins went on pretty well I think.  Got pretty familiar with the bucking bar, and made some good use of the special bar from Cleveland.  You have to uncleco a corner of the skin and reach way up in there to get the rivets in the middle of the skins.

The first skin rivets:

You can see they sit nice and flush with the skin.  The whole point is to get a flat surface that doesn't disturb the airflow at 200mph.  Smooth = Fast.

Inside the stab.  You can see some marks from the long bucking bar in there.  Lesson learned - tape the damn bar.

I had an OH CRAP moment when I saw that one rivet wasn't filled in when I flipped the VS over after just having closed up one side.  Good thing I found it when I did though, was able to still get my arm in.

She's all done!  First part down in 37.2 hours of work.  Many more to go!

First rivets

I finished riveting the Vertical Stab spars and ribs together last night, and got the skin on for the last time.  Had some trouble with the rear spar rivets at first because I wasn't holding the squeezer perfectly straight, so got to drill out my first couple.

Its starting to look like a real airplane part!

This is with the skin cleco'd on for the last time.  You can see I left the blue plastic on for protection of the exterior of the skins except for a half inch or so on either side of the rivet holes.  Its pretty easy to do with a soldiering iron.  You "score" it with the hot iron then it pulls off pretty easily.  Some people score it along a straight edge so the cuts are perfect.  I'm not that anal retentive.

Once these things are all cleco'd together, they remind me of hellraiser.  Yes?  No?

DRDT-2 and laser

Got my DRDT-2 dimpler in the mail a few weeks ago, and finally got it setup.  I built a sturdy "shelf" for it alongside one of the benches.  After using it for the Vert Stab skin, I'll probably move it back some and make it easier to remove.

The black box holds the batteries for the laser.  I realized when doing the practice kits that finding the correct position for the aluminum sheet over the dimple dies was pretty hard. When you are making 1000s of dimples, any little help is worth it.  So I splurged and got the $25 cross laser.  Its pretty slick:

It puts a super easy to see cross hairs on your work piece.

Here's me and Cora dimpling the VS skin.

First priming

I had an adventure priming for the first time.  I'm using the Akzo spray epoxy.  Everybody says its basically bullet-proof, and that its what you use if you want the plane to last 100 years.  Hopefully someday my kids, and their kids (and maybe theirs) will enjoy this beast.

Don't have pics yet, but I wear basically a full hazmat setup with a supplied air hose dragging behind me. The epoxy has some nasty cancer-causing chemicals in it so you have to be careful.  The results:

Naturally, in my rush to figure out all this new stuff I forgot a piece.  Luckily I use disposable paint cups that go right in the gun (DeKups system) so I still had the previous day's mix laying around when I found this.  I just dipped a cue-tip in it and spread the epoxy around the part.  Turned out just like the others.

Vertical Stab spars and ribs

Here's the first gotcha of the plans.  The nose ribs stick out too far at the front edges, so you need to sand them down in order to not make outward dents in the skin.  I knew this ahead of time by looking at other blogs, and went after them with 120 grit sand paper.  I didn't do it enough though.  My skins got dented slightly, but after disassembly the dents shrunk somewhat.  So then I used the fluting pliers to shrink them some more.  Hopefully that works, haven't reassembled yet.

Once you get all the parts edge-deburred, you assemble them for the first time.  Here's the guts of the vertical stab:

Now that the spars and ribs are assembled, you put the skin on and match-drill.  The parts all have this blue vinyl stuff that protects them during shipping.  You pull that off.  On the exterior surfaces I cut it just around the rivet holes to leave some protection from scratching.  Some say this is overkill because it all gets scratched up as part of paint preparation anyway, but I still do it.

Vertical Stabilizer start

They start you out by cutting stiffeners for the VS rear spar.  TONS of drilling, deburring.  I'm quickly getting used to that.

Here the rear spar is a little more assembled with the rudder attachment plates (6 white pieces) on.  Stuck here until I get the missing piece from Van's.  Used the waiting time to debur the front spar and ribs.  About 4 hours of work just edge deburring those pieces.  Maybe I'm being too finicky?

Tail kit delivery

A semi wouldn't fit down my road so I picked up the big box in my truck:

There was 7 pages of inventory, and its important to go thru every item and make sure its accounted for.  I found 4 things missing, Vans says they are in the mail.  One of which was a piece I need on page 1 of the instructions, figures.

Here's some of the stuff I unpacked.  A TON of hardware and rivets:

Ribs, fiberglass fairings, random stuff:

A boatload of skins.  These are huge:

Practice kits

I've got enough tools to be dangerous now, so I ordered both of Van's practice kits.  These let you practice the fundamental airplane construction skills before actually tackling something that will fly.

Here is the toolbox kit.  They leave the blue plastic on all the aluminum sheet from the factory to protect it.

It probably took me 5 hours or so.  Lots of deburring, drilling, dimpling, and riveting.  Pretty much love my pneumatic squeezer already, not sure how folks get along without them. That page you see is all of the instructions for that 5 hours of work, it fits on 1 page.

Here is the finished product.

It came with a cool sticker to put on when your done, but I couldn't help myself, had to go on the big box:

Here is the mostly-finished airfoil.  Figured I would hold off bending the leading edge and riveting the trailing edge so I can practice on that just before I do it on the real airplane surfaces.

And a line of back-riveted stiffners.  Back riveting leaves some awesome flush rivets behind.