I went ahead and riveted the HS-404 inner nose ribs on to the front spar since the instructions have changed and you now rivet both the upper and lower sides of HS-707 (middle nose ribs) before attaching the skin to the spar.  The instructions apparently used to specify a different order and the only way to put solid rivets on the bottom of HS-707 was to leave this rib off and reach through here to buck them.

Both left and right skins have been deburred, dimpled, and edge prepped.  Here, I’ve clecoed HS-707 and HS708 on in preparation for riveting HS-707.  The front spar will eventually go between these two ribs (where the copper clecos are), but I’ve clecoed it on here now to help the skin stay flush against HS-707.  It’s too late to start riveting this now since the kids are asleep.  Besides, I wouldn’t want to attempt this alone until I have a bit more experience.  This is going to have to wait until tomorrow night or Saturday when I can get a riveting partner.

Since I need a riveting partner to begin riveting on the horizontal stabilizer skin, I went ahead and started on the vertical stabilizer.  Here is the structure clecoed together.

And here it is will all holes drilled out to final size.  I didn’t get a picture of it, but I also clecoed on the skin and drilled all skin holes out to final size.  I then disassembled and began deburring all of the components.  I didn’t even make it completely through VS-808PP (rear spar doubler, shown below with all the lightening holes).  Just like the horizontal stabilizer rear spar doublers, I really want to get this part as close to perfect as possible since it carries a significant percentage of the load of the vertical stabilizer.

My buddies Dan and Andre stopped by today to help me begin riveting the skin on the horizontal stabilizer.  Here, we’ve just finished riveting HS-707 (middle nose rib) to the top of the skin and are clecoing on HS-708 (middle main rib) and HS-706 (tip rib) in preparation for riveting the bottom of HS-707.  We managed to get all solid rivets in the nose rib, though It took all three of us to get the front most rivet into place since the rib wanted to pull away from the skin slightly.

We went ahead and clecoed the entire horizontal stabilizer together and put rivets along one side of the front spar in preparation for my first tech counselor visit tomorrow.  Hopefully, I’ll get the thumbs up and can finish riveting this together sometime this week.

My tech counselor, Dan Checkoway, stopped by this morning to check out my progress.  He said everything looks excellent.  Now that I was good to go, my buddy Andre stopped by again to help me finish the riveting.  Here, we’re putting the last rivet in one side of the front spar.

To save time, I borrowed Andre’s squeezer and was able to squeeze two rivets at a time.  This really sped things up.  🙂

We only had to drill out a few rivets where the squeezer slipped, but I was able to drill them out without enlarging the hole, so we could just drop another rivet in.

Here, I’m squeezing the very last rivet in the horizontal stabilizer.

In about one 4 hour session, we were able to finish the horizontal stabilizer.  It looks so cool to finally see this finished.

I worked a little bit yesterday getting the vertical stabilizer structure smoothed out in preparation for priming.

I also got the horizontal stabilizer tied up to the rafters so that it’s out of the way.

I need to finish a couple of things on the kitchen remodel, so I won’t be able to make too much progress on the RV for a few days.

I dimpled and countersunk all of the ribs and spars for the vertical stabilizer tonight and got everything primed.  Unfortunately, the digital scale I bought for mixing the primer and other chemicals came with a really crappy 9-volt battery that basically only worked for about 30 minutes when I mixed the primer for the horizontal stabilizer.  Tonight, after midnight and right in the middle of mixing the primer, the battery died and I couldn’t find another 9-volt battery anywhere in the house.  Fortunately, we live fairly close to a 7-Eleven, so I was able to run out and get a new battery before the epoxy primer started to cure and finish the priming.

I’m really liking the Stewart System EkoPoxy primer.  It’s trivial to clean up and I’m very impressed with the durability on the horizontal stabilizer structure.  It’s very hard to scratch, and it’s impervious to basically all chemicals.  I really like the fact that it isn’t highly toxic like other epoxy primers, so a simple particle respirator is all you need to spray it.

My buddy Andre was going to stop by later today to help me shoot the skin rivets on the vertical stabilizer, so I got started today riveting the rear spar together.

The lower part of the rear spar uses flush rivets because this section mounts against the rear fuselage bulkhead.  The areas near the left and right sides of the picture which don’t have holes drilled yet will get holes drilled in conjunction with that bulkhead and will be bolted together.

The interior structure has been riveted together here.  Getting those rivets that hold the lower nose and main ribs to the front spar were a real bitch.  I had to use a double offset rivet set to reach them (I suppose I could have bent both ribs out of the way and squeezed them, but I would have had to bend them a lot).

Andre and I shot and bucked the vertical stabilizer rivets that can’t be reached with a squeezer.

While Madeline was taking her morning nap, I snuck out to the garage and finished riveting the vertical stabilizer.  I thought that all of the remaining rivets could be done with a squeezer.  They can certainly be reached with a squeezer, but the placement of some of the rivets and hinge brackets in the rear spar prevented getting proper alignment.  I ended up shooting and bucking probably a dozen rivets along the sides of the rear spar.

Here is an example of the bad access.  The shop head of the lower rivet which is holding the skin to the rear spar actually extends behind the plane of the face of the shop head of the upper rivet which is holding the middle rudder hinge bracket to the rear spar.  Fortunately, I have a small tungsten bucking bar with a tapered end which could tuck nicely back in this area.

I got started on the rudder stiffeners tonight.  To save a little time, I marked them to length and ganged them up to rough cut them to size.  The bandsaw is pretty loud, so that’s all I can do on these tonight.

I finished deburring the rudder stiffeners and drilled them to the skins.

The rudder stiffeners have a slight bow to them as they come from vans.  This would create a slight concavity in the rudder skin, so I slightly fluted the stiffeners to make them lay flat.  They had to be fluted on both faces since the flutes to pull the stiffeners flat also pulled the holes out of line.  Fluting between the holes pulled them back in line, but typically bows the stiffener slightly so it doesn’t lay flat anymore.  Definitely an iterative process, but by the end they were only taking me a couple of minutes per stiffener.

I still haven’t received an email back from Van’s about the top rib, so I gave them a call.  They’re going to take a closer look at my pictures and get back to me, but they did say that the top rib often requires a bit of massaging by the builder to get everything to line up.  Since I may end up using this rib anyway, I spent some time tonight getting it bent such that all of the holes lined up and the skin laid flat against its flanges.  Here is the rudder fully assembled to see how things lined up.

Here is the tip of that rib after I adjusted it a bit.  The holes line up well enough now that the clecos interfere with each other (causing the top one to lay over a bit).  I still have to adjust the fluting a bit more (you can see a slight gap between the skin and rib where the second cleco in on the top is located).

I went ahead and trimmed the rudder brace and fitted it to the rudder horn.