Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Back to work on the 10....again

So, over the course of building the 9A and now the 10 I found that there are times when motivation needs a boost.  Last time I worked on the 10 I came up to a point where there was some difficult (or so I thought) work ahead and I just didn't want to do it.  As a result I focused all of my energy on the 9A.  I did some fun new things on the 9A and I'm glad I did but as the cooler weather approaches I figure its time to get back to work on the 10.  Last week I spent the entire week cleaning up and organizing the garage so I could get back to work on the 10.  This weekend I finally got a chance to make progress building and I'm happy to report that I overcame some difficult steps and am feeling good about building again.

So, this week I managed to glue in some foam spacers for the elevator and trim tabs.  I also riveted the trailing edges on the elevators.  I did it the same way I did with the rudder (using a long flat stainless steel bar) and both trailing edges came out great!  The plans have you use ProSeal to glue the trailing edge wedge in place and then recently Van's updated those instructions to say you can use double sided tape.  Well after gluing the foam wedges in there was no way I was going to be able to get those wedges inserted with double back sticky tape on both sides.  So...I improvised.  I put my rivets in, taped them in so they wouldn't fall out, flipped the elevator over and then taped the elevator down to the stainless steel bar so it wouldn't move when I started riveting.  Then I drove the rivets and it turned out great!  See the pictures below...

Kinda hard to see all the work from last week but this is a highly organized shop compared to what it was!

Gluing in the wedges requires a little weight on the top skin.  Nice balancing act on this elevator and the one in the background...huh?

Trim tabs with the foam inserts glued in...waiting for cure.

This is the "acorn in a hole" as Van's calls it.  Its the back side of the trailing edge of the elevator with the double flush rivets.

I took this picture so you could see how nice and strait the trailing edges end up.  I'm very happy with how they turned out.