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?

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?