Front Spar

Today I finished shaping the bend relief holes on the front spars. I then cleco’d the reinforcement angles onto the spars and used some very handy yoked clamping cleco’s to hold the HS-00001 doublers in place. I’m 95% sure how I need to drill the doublers. Looks like four holes go through the flat portion of the doubler on each side. 3 holes are match drilled through the reinforcement angles and 1 hole already exists in the doubler and match drills the reinforcement angle and the spar. After the angles and the spar is bent 6 degrees, 3 additional holes are matched drilled on each side from the angles and 1 hole back through an existing hole in the doubler. I guess this is one of those types of things easier shown than described.

 

Front Spar Continued

Today I drilled the Rear Spar bearing to a #12 and trimmed back one of the front spars. Also drilled the now infamous front spar bend relief hole. Took longer than I’d like to admit but I’m still getting a hang of shaping aluminum. Tomorrow I’ll finish the other side and should go much faster.

Before:

After:

Big Bertha tucked away waiting to be used:

Talked with Vans

Talked with Vans Builder Support today. He seemed surprised at my confusion but admitted this was the first he looked at this latest set of drawing/instructions. He said he’d pull out the parts, would take a look at it and get back to me.

I followed up this afternoon and he said they all spent a good part of the morning working through everything and discovered all the problems I described. Good news is that it looks like the parts will still work, it will just be updated procedures and steps. I guess someone had to be the first to find the mistakes. I think I understand what needs to be done but will wait for Vans Engineering to send me their thoughts. It’s easier to wait and drill once than to un-drill a mistake.

I’m on work travel for the rest of the week, then planning on spending the whole weekend with my brother who’s working in Northern CA in from Atlanta. Looks like I’ll reengage next week. At least that gives me plenty of time to work out exactly what the next steps are.

Front Spar Problems

One of the great things about building an Vans RV is that you aren’t blazing trails. There are, at the time of this post, 1339 finished, flying RV7’s. Unfortunately with this new Service Bulletin that came out a few weeks ago, I am one of the very first builders to run into the latest revision of instructions/drawings. Today Donna and I got caught up on the front spar. It seems a call to Vans is in order to point out clear mistakes in the instructions and to verify I know the correct path forward.

We started by separating, shaping, deburring, and drawing the rivet-lines on the HS-00001 Spar Doubler. Then we cleco’d the reinforcement angles to the forward spar. Where we ran into problems was it says to look through the pre-punched holes in the spar for the rivet-lines and clamp the doubler in the correct location to the HS-702 spar. It seems that the HS-00001 doesn’t fit into the HS-702 channel until you first trim and prep the spar which doesn’t come until 4 steps later. Also it seems the rivet-line doesn’t match the pre-punched holes in the HS-702. I suspect you have to drill the spar through the reinforcement angles then align the doubler to those holes.

To top that all off. I noticed our pneumatic squeezer has a slight leak at the base. I’m not sure if it’s a big deal or not. In any case, I’m sure a new seal would fix the problem. We also got our expensive Cleaveland tool dimple dies in today and they don’t quite fit our squeezer properly. Nothing deal-breaking but just wasn’t a very productive day.