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!

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.

Workbench

Stefan convinced me that my conference room table wouldn't work and that we needed a real workbench.

Here is Stefan about a day or two into the work bench. Stefan's assistance here is invaluable as I don't have any experience with woodworking.

The workbench is 4'x8' with a shelf space underneath and a special dimpling surface you can see built around the dimpler.

Here is the finished product. We've got a layer of carpet on the dimpling surface and the workbench to protect the wood. For now, it is removable.

A close up shot of the dimpler. You can see the surface is even with the bottom half of the dimpling set. Pretty cool!

Practice Tool Box

Here we are working on the practice tool box. Clecoing, drilling, deburring, dimpling are all straightforward. The hand squeeze rivet gun is easy to operate. We squeezed some of the rivets too hard and bent the aluminum. A soft surface on the table would also help protect the metal.



Riveting with the gun and bucking bar is lots of fun. We learned to keep the bucking bar off the aluminum to avoid scratches. The cupped set used with universal head rivets will take some practice. We skipped a few dents across the aluminum.




Here is the completed tool box in just around 10 hours. Looks good other than the dents in the front from the rivet gun.

Practice Kit and Tools Arrived

Here I am with Stefan on our first day. The tools just arrived and we've layed them out on our conference room table work-bench along with the two practice kits.


Tools were purchased from Cleaveland Tools - their basic starter set. The practice kits were purchased from Vans Aircraft.


Instructions on the tools and kit were light. We had to get some air tool oil to get started using the pneumatic drill and rivet gun.

We are eager to get started.

Introduction

Welcome to Jim Ruttler's RV-10 blog where you can follow along and review my progress as I build my own airplane!

No, I don't know how to fly a plane or how to build one, but I'm not going to let these small details prevent me from trying. I've recruited Stefan, my father-in-law, to assist with the building and my dad to assist with the flying part. Now, I just need to get started.