Hangar and 10 work

This week I am still without an airplane so I spent more time on the 10 and even more time in the hangar working on spiffing it up for its newly painted occupant.  Looking forward to brightening up the hangar a bit so this weekend with the help of Mariah and Harry I managed to get the new ceiling boards up and taped.  Next up is some drywall for the bare studs and then some nice white paint on the walls...  should really brighten up the hangar a lot.

On the 10 I managed to finish up the rudder, and get a start on the horizontal stabilizer.  There is a lot of deburring, drilling and such before anything starts going together.

On a side note I got a chance to fly with my friend Ben who built an RV-12.  I have never flown in a 12 before and it was both familiar and different.  Since its an RV it has the RV feel to the flight characteristics, but since its a light sport, it has far less power and speed.  It was still a great flight!

Bent the ears over the counterweight.

Rudder complete and ready for storage.

Working on the forward spar on the horizontal stabilizer.  Here I am drilling the "feet" that are used to hold the forward edge down to the fuselage.

Here you can see the "feet" as this is a shot looking up at the bottom of the spar.  The clamps are holding a piece of aluminum angle to the bottom of the feet to keep them parallel with each other.

Here is Harry and his ingenious tape rolling tool.  In this picture we are running the tape over the seems.  If you look at the top of the pole he is holding you will see the roll of tape we are using....ingenious...

This is a "before" picture of the hangar ceiling...

And here it is at the end of our work day.  So much better but still lots of work to do on the walls.

Airplane-less

I don't know if Airplane-less is a word but it certainly fits my situation right now.  I have finally dropped the airplane off for painting!!!!  Jeff and I flew to Chilliwack BC on Friday to deliver the airplane to Upper Valley Aviation.  I will hopefully write up another post later on with more pictures that Jeff took.  I'm hoping to have it back in the next 3-4 weeks!

In the meantime I got a chance to get back to the RV-10 yesterday.  I started working on the trailing edge of the rudder and was able to get it riveted with better than expected results.  I used the 3M double sided tape to hold the AEX wedge in place as recommended by Vans but there was a slight wave in the unfinished product.  I decided to go buy a 1/2" stainless steel bar that was long enough to fit the entire trailing edge.  I then clamped the rudder to that bar (after putting in my rivets and tape) and then proceeded to rivet the edge together.  As you can see in the picture it came out great!

I also started on the leading edge roll process but wasn't able to finish that completely.

You can see the stainless steel bar I used as a bucking bar to rivet the entire trailing edge without moving the rudder.  In this picture I had not quite finished the process...still had to flip the rudder and do some back riveting to flush the shop side of the rivets that you can see slightly poking up.  For the back riveting I used my tungsten bucking bar and moved it from rivet to rivet as needed.

This is as far as I got with the leading edge of the rudder.  Should be able to finish it up this week and move on to the horizontal stabilizer.

More rudder work and a wing kit

Wow, only two weeks since my last post...I must be getting better...not.

For the last two weeks I haven't done too much work on the 10 but I did re-do some work.  I had started putting the rudder together and after getting the ribs riveted together I tried to get the forward spar to fit.  Well guess what?  I had installed all of the ribs on the wrong skins!  That required some amount of cussing and then a long process of drilling out all of the rivets, and then re-riveting the entire structure back together again.  I'm almost back to the point where I started the week.

On a more positive note, yesterday Harry and I drove up to a house north of here and took a look at a 10 wing kit that someone was selling.  The work looked pretty good and most importantly there wasn't a ton of riveting done.  I really want to do the majority of the work on the kit myself but I couldn't say no to the huge savings I would get if I purchased this wing kit.  After looking at the work on both the wing, and the completed empennage I decided to purchase it.  Now I have a backup empennage kit that I can sell (assuming I don't mess up the one I am working on now).  Harry was nice enough to offer to come help me pick up the kit today!

Finally on my list of news I got to do some flying this week but I will save that for another post.

OH yea, I also installed a step up converter on the 9 landing light mount.  Now I can install the 24v LED landing lights that Harry gave me!

Look at all those pretty rivets!  Yep, I had to drill them all out and the ones on the other skin not shown in this picture.

Ok, this looks a little odd, but its actually me riveting the two skins together.  The upper skin is lifted up so I can work on the ribs one at a time and then lower the skin to the next rib.  Yes this was taken before I figured out I had put the ribs on the wrong skins....

Some progress

Another long hiatus from posting but I think I am slowly getting back into the build again.  I've spent a few days this past week working on the rudder of the 10 and I have a picture of two below to show the progress but I think more importantly you have to see what has been taking up all my garage time.

One of the downfalls of building an airplane in your garage is the dust and aluminum shavings that seem to get on everything.  Well for the 10 I decided to limit that as much as possible so I have partitioned off the smaller bay of the garage with a temporary insulated wall.  On that wall I have built a small "paint station" that I can use to spray primer on the parts that need it.  The neat part of the new paint station is that I have added a ducted fan to the base of it and am venting the exhaust outside.  Hopefully this will keep the overspray dust down a bit better than what I did with the 9.

Anyway, on with some pictures...

This is the new temporary wall from the larger part of the garage.

This little hole in the wall is where the ducted fan exhaust goes through the new temporary wall.  I took this picture before I actually built the rest of the paint station.

My little vent elbow that I will use to duct the overspray vent outdoors.

A little hard to see in this picture but this is my new priming station.  I have the plans sitting on the screen top in this picture and I have not put up the sloping lower front panel but the entire top part can be collapsed against the wall if I need the extra space in the room.

A look from the garage door end of the room.  You can see the door to the new work space here.  

another shot of the temporary wall and you can see the paint station in the back corner of the room.

The rudder just after I finished final drilling all the necessary holes.  I had started to remove the cleco's and realized I haven't been taking may pictures so I stopped to "capture the moment"

After final drilling of the rudder it was time to disassemble and debur.

Countersinking the AEX wedge that connects the two trailing edges of the rudder.  I'm using my drill press to make sure the countersinks are perpendicular.

Here you can see my "jig" that I created to ensure the wedge was held at the correct angle while I did the countersinking.

Another view of the widge jig.  The holes are there to give the countersink bit guide pin a place to go below the wedge during the countersinking process.

Back to the DRDT2 dimpling tool.  Here I'm dimpling the rudder skins.  This tool is so much faster and easier than the way I did it on the 9 not to mention the dimples are higher quality and more consistent.  Well worth the money I paid for it.