I did a lot of work on the HS today. I started by drilling all of the rear spar stiffener holes. That Souix air drill really is nice! I drilled all of the elevator hinge brackets. The instructions call for riveting the center bracket together, but I'm putting that off until I have a bunch of parts ready to prime and assemble so I can do it all at once. I'll just leave it clecoed until then. I moved on to the front spar and did the 6 degree bends on the angles and the HS-702s. They can be seen here in in their future homes.
I find it interesting that in all of the other builder logs I have seen that nobody mentions the dimpling and countersinking of the middle 4 rivet locations on the front spar. This was a big 'stop and learn' point for me. I had to read about dimpling and countersinking, since I had not ever done any of that stuff yet. I learned that even though the holes are #30 (0.1285 inches), the rivets used are 1/8" (AN426AD4 - the AD4 means 1/8"), and therefore the dimples are also 1/8". The countersink is a #30, though (of course!). So I got brave, put the dimple dies in the squeezer, confirmed that I was dimpling the spar in the right direction, and made my first dimples.
Here you can see the countersunk holes in the angle. '2 clicks' past where the rivet sits flush in the countersink holes, as the instructions suggest.
I did a whole bunch of deburring of sheet edges and holes. No pics of that super fun stuff. In preparing the ribs, I tried my hand at fluting. That didn't go so great. It took a lot of playing around with the ribs to get them to lay flat and for the flanges to sit at 90 degrees to the web. I finally got them to behave, but I definitely haven't mastered this skill yet. I'm sure there's plenty of time to practice once I get to the wings. In preparing HS-405 you get to drill holes where there are none as of yet. Another first time for something in this project. I had to decipher the drawing and dimensions for this activity. Kinda odd how they are called out, but after a few minutes of studying them I think I know what they want (and why they want it). Marked, punched the centers and drilled #40 pilot holes. That wasn't too bad.
After a bunch more uncleco-ing, deburring, and recleco-ing I had the HS skeleton together. I was cruising right along, on a roll, even! Next step, cleco the skins on. Cool! I'm gonna have my first recognizable plane part sitting in front of me soon. Vans says to do it one half at a time. Screw that! I'm doing it all in one piece... Why not. So on goes the left skin. That was an interesting experience. It took a little force to get it on there and get the clecos installed. I got all the ribs lined up nicely and the top half was clecoed on. I'll put the right side on now and flip the whole thing to do the bottom. So I was positioning the skin on the right side and something caught my attention. I looked a little closer. Damn!
Well that'll put a damper on this step. The holes for HS-708 and the outboard half of HS-603PP on half of the skin (bottom half, on the right) were obviously drilled twice. The last pic is at the intersection of HS-708 and HS-603PP. And here's the outboard rear corner of the skin. The blue plastic is torn up from the duct tape that was holding the skins down in the shipping box. I can't believe I didn't notice this while I was unpacking it. I guess I was just too excited to get it all out and look at it. And I knew I had to inventory the kit, but I didn't expect to have to look for defects!
Both halves at HS706 were double-drilled, but they were closer, so the holes were just oval.
Oh well. I sent an email with pics off to Van's so we'll see how quickly this gets fixed (I've heard good things from others). And I guess that's a good stopping point for today. I got the left skin on (yes, that's the left one, it's just bottom side up in this pic), and there's a bunch of stuff I can do there tomorrow. Or maybe I'll just skip ahead to the vertical stabilizer until my replacement skin shows up.
Here's a good pic of the current status of the project. Not too shabby for the first full day I got to work on it!
