Saturday, July 31, 2010

Empennage Delivery

Delivery day July 31, 2010. The box was bigger than expected. I'm wondering if this was such a good idea after all.





Here is Marek demonstrating to everyone how the airplane will work.








You know your in trouble when your bag of rivets looks like this.








Some sort of airplane parts here. Work to begin early next week. Here we go!

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Stabilizer

Here are the stabalizer pieces layed out. Skins are on the right and the ribs and spar are on the left. Towards the top right you can see the internal stiffeners.










The bench grinder stone was medium grit and too coarse. It did more harm than good to the edges of the metal. Fine sandpaper worked better to smooth out the edges. Here I am smoothing the sanded edges with a buffing wheel attached to the grinder.








Looks pretty mean with the clecos in. It was important here to hold the skins exactly in place to drill out the trailing edge wedge which fits between the opposing skins here in the corner.






Here is the finished product. We only made a couple of mistakes with the rivet gun this time and learned to only rivet against a secure surface. Also, we weren't able to get to four rivets towards the back of the ribs. The space was too tight to get a bucking bar and I figured it wasn't worth the extra effort to make the special tool. We may superglue them in!

Looking good Stefan. Here is the leading rolled edge. We used a broom handle and some packing tape to roll the edges and used pop rivets to secure the top skin to the bottom skin.





I'm thinking here that I better get back to work so I can buy the tail kit.