A bunch of progress since the last post.

An idea that I stole from Ed Kranz was to take some used carpet and cut out a spot for a back-riveting plate. Like him, I had to  shim underneath of the plate to make sure it sat proud of the carpet surface. The carpet allowed clecos to be inserted from the inside of the structure and poke into the carpet without disrupting a solid surface to rivet against. After a few sessions of adjustments, I finally got it just right to be a solid setup. This has made very hard to reach areas to rivet with just one person much more doable.

I assembled the right side first, followed by the left side, to keep the structure as open as possible for access to back riveting. One mistake that I made was getting the bottom aft skin on top of of the J-channel stiffener when it should really be between the outer skin and the stiffener.

I had to drill out about 17 rivets to pull the bottom aft skin out and correct. In doing so, I buggered up one hole by somehow tearing the dimple.

I asked Van’s how to deal with this issue, seeing I don’t have edge clearance to just drill a new hole. They said to stop drill it and make a backing tab to put behind the flange tab.

Some other pics of the progress by the end of the weekend.

Boy there are a lot of parts to prime in the tailcone. It took several sessions to finish all of the priming. I started by doing the skins, and then 2 additional sessions to do the remaining smaller parts. On most parts I take the blue protective coating off of the part the first time I start to work on it. With the skins, I’ve been leaving the outer blue protective coating on until later in the process to help prevent scratches. Upon removing the coating from the side skins, I found a bunch of surface corrosion starting. Nothing too terrible, but enough that some spots took a lot of elbow grease to sand off. I mostly used a maroon scotch brite pad, but a couple of stubborn spots needed a little fine sandpaper to go a bit deeper, followed by more scotch brite to get it completely off. I then sprayed the areas with some rattle can self-etching primer to help protect it for now.

This picture will give you an idea of how many spots there were to deal with.

 

Making decent progress on the tailcone. I’ve got the lower structure completed and match drilled. Starting to work on putting the top skins on now. Getting close to taking everything apart to do some massive deburring.

I’ve also placed my order for the Quick Build Fuselage. Initially, I was thinking I would slow build this part, but have since decided to order the QB. I didn’t do it the standard way in terms of ordering both the QB wings and fuse at the same time, but that should be fine. It also helps spread out the money outlay a little bit.

My wings are currently scheduled to be shipped in January. Fuselage in April. I should have plenty to keep me busy between now and January. I still have to finish the tailcone, attach the entire emp together, and do the fiberglass fairings. That should keep me busy until the wings come. Then I’ll have some stuff to work on with the wings prior to getting the Fuse a few months later.

 

A video of me match drilling one of the bottom J-Channel Stiffeners.

Then I realized I had made a mistake. I had aligned one of the J-channel stiffeners to the wrong starting hole. Oops.

I had actually discovered it when I was checking to make sure that the aft end of the stiffener was captured by the tab in the bulkhead. Clearly it wasn’t.

So what I did was to slide the stiffener down and align the first drilled hole with the hole it should have aligned to. The end result was I had to drill extra holes almost equally spaced between the existing holes along the entire length of the stiffener. This worked well. I ran it by Van’s and got their blessing as well just to be sure the extra holes wouldn’t compromise the stiffener too much.