Jun 19-20 Shop Work and Vertical Stabilizer

Not a heck of lot of airplane work this weekend. Was the perfect weather to work inside on a plane (low 50s and rain); however had to put out a fire with the bumper sticker site related to address verification. Seems that the Web Service vendor is turning off the old version in 30 days, so I had to code up an update for the new version of the service. Most likely their initial warning about this change wound up in my junk mail filter. The hard part isn't rewriting this -- it's figuring out the code that someone else wrote the first time.

Saturday I spent mega $$ to purchase an industrial-grade air filter for the compressor, and to st up two lines: one for high-pressure air at 100 PSI that the rivet squeezer will use, and another set to 40 PSI or so for the rivet gun. With two lines there is no need to change pressure settings all the time.

Following the instructions provided with the unit, I located it 25 feet downstream from the compressor. Physically the filter and compressor are next to each other -- I simply used a 25 ft coil of hose, hung on the wall, to provide the distance. This is required to allow the air to cool enough that moisture condenses before reaching the filter.

Note the photo below. This was screwed to the wall, which I previously covered with 3/4" plywood as part of the garage remodel in prep for building the plane. You can also see that I marked out "don't drill here" zones to make this worry free. Hmmm, I should become a consultant and charge BP big bucks by selling them a map of the Gulf of Mexico -- all hatched out with a marker...

Which brings us to the galvanized pipe. That vertical run has a fitting at the top for the hose, with a quick-connect fitting. Then there is a 12 inch run with a ballcock at the bottom, intended to act as a drain to keep water out of the filter. There is also a drain on the bottom of the filter. However when it comes to painting I'll still need a desiccant cartridge in the hose ahead of the paint gun.

One final thought about this setup. Do your homework before hunting down the parts. Went to two different commercial shops (one being an auto paint supplier) and the help in each was absolutely worthless. They didn't even know what the filter did! I am done supporting local businesses -- they can't even claim value added in the form of knowledgeable help.

Very little actual aircraft construction: all I did was de-burr and flute the ribs for the vertical stabilizer. You can see the fluting pliers in the second photo. The idea is to correct bend induced in the ribs when the edges were turned up. Not going to re-tell the entire story about fluting here; however it's fun to watch the rib straighten back out and lose the bow that was there before this operation.

Total time: 5 hours, with 0.5 hours on the plane per-se.