Saturday, May 4, 2013

I though dimples were cute...until now

Today I spent the majority of the day in the garage hangar working on two items.  First I dimpled both elevator skins and their associated stiffeners.  That took about 2 hours because I used my pop rivet dimpler to do both skins.  It seems to do such a nice job of creating consistent dimples and the space available just doesn't make it easy to use the long arm dimpler.  I am very happy with the results but it did take longer than normal.

using my pop rivet dimpler to dimple the elevator skins

I ran out of AN4-3 rivets.  I have to order more and this will help remind me to put it in when I get them.


After finishing up the elevator dimpling I moved on to the rudder assembly.  For some reason I thought I was about done with the rudder, but here it is 8 pm in the evening and I am still not done.  I am close.  I am ready to epoxy the trailing edge and let it sit while I am out of town this week.  By the time I get back it should be ready for the riveting.  I guess I will find out if its as hard as they say to get and keep a strait trailing edge.

I will say I goofed twice today.  I riveted the bottom of the rudder without installing the fairing attach strips.  So, I had to drill out about 20 rivets and re-install them with the strips in place.  I also got my first chance to use the blind rivets (pop rivets) that are beveled.  In the picture below you can see how narrow the trailing edge gets, well I couldn't get a bucking bar in there, nor could I get my squeezer in there.  So, Van's conveniently includes the option to use the blind rivets.  They came out pretty good.

The other goof was when I riveted the counter balance rib to the wrong side of the spar.  Drilled out two rivets and put it in correctly.  Sometime it seems no matter how many times I look at the plans I miss things.
Angle cleco'd on and ready for epoxy tomorrow morning

Rudder mostly assembled and riveted.  Waiting on trailing edge.

Its miller time...well I guess that Coors light time since that's all I have.  :-)