Feel a little guilty about not working on the RV7. Renting just became too much and we broke down and bought our first plane, a 1946 Cessna 140. Getting some things squared away with the Cessna has taken time away from the RV7. We call our first plane “Old Glory”… for reasons apparent in the picture below.
On the RV7 side, we got an hour or riveting in. Should be another day to finish the horizontal stabilizer up.
We’ve finally gotten back to a little bit of riveting. We almost have the left side of the horizontal stabilizer riveted up. It was a pretty beautiful day though so after Donna hit her head on the table we decided to call it a day. Once I get back from work travel we’ll continue on. Just one more row of bucking and then squeezing left to rivet on the left side. Then we get to repeat it all on the right side.
Feels good to get back on the project today! Been in Taiwan for a very very nice vacation. I borrowed an alligator squeezer from a friend at SZP. This was invaluable in setting the rivets on the elevator hinge brackets, where the C-squeezer couldn’t fit. As with everything, the right tool makes hard work easy. Sure, I could have riveted with the gun and a bucking bar but the squeezers set the rivets so nicely and the gun on the universal heads, specially the AD4’s, seem to just smash the daylights out of everything.
I also trimmed the little cut outs in the middle of the rear spar for elevator clearance. Why I didn’t do this before I prepped and painted everything is beyond me. Note to self, everything has to get done at one point or another, so do something as soon as you can.
After waiting for the touch up paint to dry, next I’ll bolt up the center elevator bracket then start riveting the HS structure up.
Today we started riveting up the Horizontal Stabilizer. We got through most of the rear spar. The pneumatic squeezer in our yoke (Big Bertha) was the way to go on most of these rivets. The rivets came out looking great. I couldn’t image hand squeezing or bucking all of these AD4 rivets. The rivets closest the the elevator hinges are a little tricky. We’ll have to buck these or borrow an alligator-type squeezer. We didn’t get as much done as we were planning but we had a nice day and rented a Cessna 172 to fly up to the coast to Santa Barbara and back.
The tape is to prevent accidentally riveting the holes that attach the ribs.
Today we made great progress finishing all the dimpling and the priming. The priming is a lot of work. The process we’re currently following is to lightly scuff all the structural pieces (Ribs/Spars/reinforcement angles/doubles/etc.). Then we acetone everything to clean, then we prepare everything with alumi-prep, rinse, dry, alodine, rinse, dry, paint with Napa 7220 self etching primer. I’m not set up to paint with my compressor but to my surprise, the self etching primer works great. The paint is extremely tough and will work great for this use.
We’re patiently watching paint dry tonight and tomorrow we’ll start riveting everything together.
N928DD 