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.