Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Tailcone Attach

As mentioned in an earlier post, we are reordering events slightly here and performing Section 32 (Tailcone Attach) prior to Section 31 (Upper Forward Fuse).

So tonight we had one of those few moments that really didn't take too much work but really had a tremendously rewarding payoff. It's amazing how seeing what the airplane looks like from firewall to tail can really light a fire under you!

Started Section 32 with a relatively naive mind, in the sense that I hadn't really done much read-ahead in this section and I just planned to perform each step as it is called out. The section starts with the F-1006B Bulkhead, final-drilling and dimpling a number of holes (not sure why this couldn't just have been done in the tailcone section for the empennage, but whatevs), and then transferring the bulkhead over to the fuselage and clecoing it to the baggage floor ribs. The very next step is pretty cool: cleco the tailcone to the fuselage.

Tailcone clecoed to fuselage, R side

Tailcone clecoed to fuselage, L side

There are a LOT of rivets from front to back!


F-1074 Tailcone Forward Top Skin clecoed into position

Holy mackerel, this airplane is big!

I'd like to point out that Sarah and I have seen dozens upon dozens of RV-10's before, but always in their "natural environment" like a hangar or ramp somewhere, or of course Oshkosh. We're also intimately familiar with the size and shape of both the fuselage section and the tailcone section from building one of each. Furthermore, we've had those two pieces laying on benches next to each other for the past couple days now and could easily picture them mated together. Even so, none of that actually prepared us for the emotion that was felt when we took a step back to admire the two sections actually clamped together, temporarily forming a complete fuselage from firewall to tail!

To be honest, the fuselage section always looked a bit small to me as we were building it. I'm aware of how much room there actually is in a complete RV-10 since we've sat (and flown) in a few of them, but for whatever reason the fuselage up until this point has always appeared kind of small to us. Now all of a sudden with the tailcone attached this airplane looks HUGE! We spent a good 30 minutes just staring at the fuselage and marveling about how this is going to be the machine that takes us (and plenty of our stuff) all over the place in just a couple more years. It's times like this that make up for all the tedious and sometimes boring work that you can drone on with for sometimes weeks at a time.

Anyway, once the shock had worn off and the drool was wiped from our mouths, we finished up the build session by match-drilling the four holes per side between the mid fuse and aft longerons, and installed bolts to hold things in place. Two little shims were fabricated out of 0.025" scrap (about 3/4" x 2" in size) to tuck between the top skin and the mid fuse longeron. Next step is to match-drill the side skins to the longerons, but that's enough for tonight... more to come soon!