After traveling all of last week for work, I was excited to get a full day of work in today. We took the HS skeleton apart and deburred everything. We also used a hand seamer to bend the rib flanges parallel to the skin (referenced from the spar flange). If you don’t do this, when you rivet the skins on, you’ll end up with surface deformations from the ribs.
After we got the left side of the skeleton back together, we laid out the left skin and cleco’d the skeleton in. A second set of hands is very helpful at this point. The skins are not yet drilled to #40’s so the clecos do not want to go in easily.
After getting the skin all cleco’d on, I noticed a hole in the skins that didn’t seem to be shown on the drawing.
The old drawing (from our preview plans) :
The new drawing included in out kit, incorporating the HS-00005, HS-00006 and HS-00001 parts, along with new instructions on trimming back the HS-702’s. Notice there is a hole missing in the image of the skins but the skins haven’t changed part numbers:
In practice, this is what it looks like when you put all the parts together:
Left scratching our heads, we decided to take a couple more pictures and attach the right hand side rather than pressing on to drill out and of the holes in the skins or attaching the HS-00005 and HS-00006.
We may put the right hand skins on tomorrow and just set it aside until we hear back from Vans. In the meantime, we’ll start the Vertical Stabilizer which is said to be the easiest part of the empennage and one that hasn’t changed in a while so hopefully will go smoothly. Overall not the progress I would have hoped for today but in the long run, this won’t even be a bump in the road.
N928DD 