Spent some time this weekend doing the airfoil practice project. It consists of 2 basic projects; An angle frame attached to 2 skins that overlap each other, the other is a miniature section of an airfoil. The whole point of doing this was to get familiar with my tools on something that isn’t the real airplane. Better to make mistakes on this, and mistakes I made. Even though I was frustrated, they were all things that I took note of for next time, and the projects didn’t come out all that bad.
A picture of the first project:
I thought this came out pretty good with the exception that the overlapping skin wasn’t aligned perfectly with the inner skin. I think I didn’t clamp things down enough to prevent movement. I’ll know better next time.
Then I moved on to the airfoil kit and made quite a bit of progress. I was able to do some back riveting and got to use my pneumatic squeezer.
Stiffeners clecoed onto the skins 
Stiffeners back-riveted on. A lot of these are over driven, and should have been replaced. Air setting was too high on my gun.
A view of the plans and the spar, plates, and ribs laid out.
Top and Bottom skin clecoed on
Skins mostly riveted on.
I still need to set the last couple of rivets at the trailing edge of the ribs. These are in a tight space, and I didn’t have much luck with a couple of the techniques I tried today. I ended up drilling them out. I also attempted to rivet the trailing edge, but didn’t do it right. I should have paused and read the section on double flush riveting again. So I will drill out the rivets on the trailing edge and try those again.
adamsrv10 