Saturday, April 3, 2010

April 3 - Work on Stabilizer Skin

Spent a good share of the day on the RV today, and feel that some amount of progress resulted.

First order of business was to disassemble the pieces that I'd put together so far for deburring. Then I created a stand out of Van's VB-10 plywood templates. Simple to set up, using an air nailer to fasten blocks in place, followed by screws.

Making the nose robs fit inside the skin was another story. LOTS of fluting and persuasion made them fit. Once these parts were clecoed to the skin, I added the rest of the skeleton and match drilled all holes using a #40 bit. Then everything was taken apart yest again for deburring -- this time the skin was deburred. Man, there are a zillion holes! The wings will be really tedious...

Need to add some duct tape to the edges before building the next part, though -- the cradle scuffed up the blue plastic on the skins.

Speaking of that blue plastic, I spent 45 minutes with a solder gun to remove the plastic around the holes.

Finally, I wasted two hours tracking down Adel clamps and some conduit to put into the horizontal stab. The conduit has me a bit worried about life expectancy -- it's some of that split loom that appears to be really cheap PVC. So I may use thin-wall PVC instead. Also need to track down some 1x1 6061 T6 angle aluminum to make brackets like these.

Time: 8 hours


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