Elevators - Day 3

Took a few days off from building, and had a pretty short night tonight for a Saturday, but got a lot done! Went from page 9-3 to 9-7, which involved clecoing together a mockup of all four spars, the 18 ribs, and the skins... it's starting to look like a pair of elevators!

The elevators, through step 9-7.2.

Things have been pretty busy with both work and school lately, and so I haven't had much time to build. If I'm lucky, I might get a couple more hours in tomorrow, but otherwise this is about as much as I might get done this weekend... still plenty more to do!

Elevators - Day 2

More work on the elevator, grabbing the necessary parts that make up the handful of subassemblies, deburring/drilling, and moving on to the next. After a few hours of this, I had all 16 rib assemblies, both E-903/904/913 counterbalance assemblies, the E-1022 shear clips, and the four skins prepped. Unfortunately no pictures tonight, but there really wasn't much to show... just a lot of slow but steady progress towards assembling these parts...

Elevators - Day 1

After a quick cleanup and reset in the workshop, it was time to dig up all the parts for the elevator and start fresh on a brand new section:

Starting on Section 9: Elevators

As with the start of every section so far, the first few hours of work involve a lot of tedious unwrapping, cutting, deburring, and drilling; ending up with a pile of parts that don't look all that much different from what they looked like at the beginning. The elevators were no exception-- in fact, they seemed to involve an even greater number of small parts, each of which needing the same precision and care as the last.

Mike rough-sanding the E-1008A/B ribs after cutting

After making 32 smooth, rounded-edge rib halves from 16 blanks, we decided to call it an early night... plenty more work to do on these!

Rudder Complete!

What a surge of motivation yesterday when we got to see a real, flying RV-10 and speak to its builder for hours! We were able to make quick work of the trailing and leading edges of the rudder, letting us check this box off just one day after checking off the HS!

Rolling the leading edge skin with duct tape and some 1.25" PVC pipe

Sarah setting the pop rivets into the leading edge... it was a little tricky applying just the right pressure to not have the ends of the skin bow either in or out.

The trailing edge after riveting: we used the same technique as on the trim tab, and I'm very pleased with the results!

The rudder with the trim tab installed: the rivet pattern matches up, and everything looks very straight!

Only two parts remain in the empennage: the elevator and the tailcone! We're both so pleased and excited with the progress we've made so far, but there is LOTS more to do... stay tuned for tomorrow, when we'll begin on the elevator!

Horizontal Stabilizer Complete!

A few short hours later, and I was rewarded with the completion of the biggest part yet on this journey! It's really incredible how strong (and light) the HS feels once it's all together, especially after feeling how flimsy all the pieces are by themselves... it truly is a real-life example of a whole being more than the sum of its parts...

The completed HS, right side.

The completed HS, left side.

Today was also a pretty exciting day because I got to see a real live RV-10 up close! Our local EAA chapter's flight advisor, Dave, who has a remarkably long list of accolades as both a pilot and a flight instructor... just so happens to have built one himself, and regards it as his favorite airplane. He was kind enough to invite Sarah and I up to his hangar and give us a full walkthrough... along with opinions, advice, and words of encouragement. Hopefully sometime soon we'll have a chance to go flying in it! For now, here's happy Mike sitting in the same model of plane he is building, for the first time:

Horizontal Stabilizer Assembly

Wow there are a lot of rivets on this part! The dimpler got a good workout today, that's for sure:

The homemade C-frame dimpler in action

After dimpling the skins and prepping the rest of the parts, it was time to begin actually assembling the HS.

The skins set in their cradles, ready for final riveting and assembly

The nose ribs, riveted into the skins.

First, the nose ribs were riveted to the skins, after which the whole front spar, rib, and stringer assembly went in as one part. A few hundred rivets and many hours later, I had about half of the HS assembled. Dinner plans with friends brought the day to a close, which was probably good since I was starting to get very tired of the monotony of the whole riveting process!

HS Front Spar Assembly

As promised, work continued today on the HS. I finished priming the parts for the front spar and ribs, and began assembling the front spar. This included riveting the main attachment brackets to the doubler and spar with a healthy number of rivets... this thing has to be strong, and what do you know, it is!

The HS front spar, just after riveting

The spar, doubler, and attachment brackets, laid over the instructions calling out the appropriate rivets.

That's all for now... next thing will be to assemble the ribs to the stringers and start putting the whole assembly together!

HS Rear Spar/Trim Tab Work

A lot of the project is on hold until the first coating of primer that I applied yesterday has had 48 hours to cure so I can finish the job. However, the HS Rear Spar was already fully primed and could be assembled, so I focused on that. I riveted it and its parts together per the plans in sections 8-2 and 8-3. I also added two grounding nutplates near the number 2 and 4 elevator hinges, in case I want to add static wicks in the future.

 The #2 elevator hinge bracket, with the grounding nutplate just inboard of it.

 The #4 elevator hinge bracket, mirror image of what was done to the #2 bracket above.

 

The #3 (center) elevator hinge, with all rivets holding the doubler in place shown here.

The other side of the HS Rear Spar, with the hinge bolts torqued properly into place.

While waiting for things to do on the HS, I turned my attention briefly to the rudder. The proseal had cured enough to move on to riveting, and I thought it would be best to rivet the trim tab trailing edge first, since if I messed that up it would be easier than redoing the whole rudder! I had the rivets alternate directions to make things more even (probably for appearance more than anything) but I think it did help it stay straight too. There are a lot of posts online that warn builders of this step, so I was going pretty cautiously... It actually turned out to be a lot of nervousness over nothing, it went together very easily thankfully!

The rudder trim tab, with the trailing edge riveted together.

I'm not sure if the picture does it justice-- looking at it now, it appears to be a little wavy, but it actually came out very straight. There is one spot near the bottom corner that we'll need to fill in slightly though, because the corner got rounded off too much on one side, but I'm pretty confident it won't be that big of a deal. I'll see if I can take a better picture of it once it's all assembled together.

Sarah found the mother load of primer across town today, and so we bought 6 more cans... hopefully that should be enough for the rest of the empennage! Now we wait until tomorrow to finish priming and then begin the final assembly of the horizontal stabilizer.

Horizontal Stabilizer - Day 4

Tonight was a fun night! We continued onto section 8-9, adding the stringers and rear spar to the HS assembly, and clecoing the entire skin into place. Now comes the fun task of final-drilling every single hole in the skin, through any combination of ribs, stringers, and spars. Sarah and I decided to split sides and each work either the top or bottom skin. First, though, we needed to figure out which drill was the lightest one so that Sarah could use it ;-)

Ergonomics [and Chivalry] 101: Sarah determines which DeWalt 14.4V drill is lighter using the epoxy-mixing/postage scale.

After an arduous drill-usage negotiation, I took my 2.1kg drill to the bottom skin while Sarah took her 1.8kg drill to the top skin, and we spent the next several hours final-drilling every hole in the horizontal stabilizer. Just as drilling was coming to a close, our friend Brannen stopped by to watch and help with the process. After disassembly, all the holes needed to be deburred and then dimpled, which everyone including our dog Mesa was happy to watch:

Everyone, even the dog, was told to act serious while Mike works.

The dimpling process is getting pretty familiar by now. I've learned that putting one handle of the squeezer into a vice makes it a lot easier to run it through each hole in each part in the least amount of time. An hour or two of dimpling later, and it was prime time!

The HS bits, 97% primed

Unfortunately, I ran out of primer around midnight. This mostly affected the HS front spar, but many of the parts could have used a little more attention to the corners, etc. I quickly hopped over to Walmart (dressed to the 9's, of course) in the hopes that they would have some more in stock, but alas they were still out from the last time I had checked a couple weeks ago. This means that I'll have to wait two days before priming again, since the instructions say that additional coats must be applied within 1 hour or after 48 hours. Time to call it a night!

Horizontal Stabilizer - Day 3

Made it through almost 4 pages of the plans today! While yesterday dealt with parts going on the HS rear spar, today was all about the HS front spar. I started by making the HS-1013, HS-1014, and HS-1015 spar caps and stringers out of their raw materials:

Starting Section 8-4

The familiar process of measuring, measuring again, cutting, coarse sanding, coarse filing, and fine filing began. Sarah was away today, flying to KPRO (Perry, IA) in a Cardinal with some friends to attend a meeting with (and join) the 99's. Super excited for her, and jealous that she got to ride in a Cardinal :-)! In her absence, my friend Roy stopped over and helped keep me company with the fabrication process. The spar caps then needed to be clamped into the HS front spar and match-drilled to the specified holes. About 4 hours later (including a quick trip to Sears to buy more 3/32" drill bits), I had these parts in front of me:

At this point, we were in the middle of section 8-5, which called for the temporary assembly of the HS front spar, doubler, caps, and HS attachment brackets. I got a kick out of the fact that the plans called out to use "something flat" to align the brackets square against the spar.

The plans for temporarily assembling the HS front spar components

My "something flat" was a scrap 1"x1" piece of square metal stock, left over from when I built my C-frame dimpling tool.

It turns out that a total of nine holes are necessary to rivet these brackets to the front spar (only 4 had been drilled when the above photo was taken). Needless to say, the drilling process had my full attention! Anyway, some time later I had completed everything in this section except for the riveting portion, and was able to move on to the ribs in section 8-6 thru 8-8.

Even though Sarah was away today, I still need to give her credit on this step, since in anticipation for this section she had already unwrapped and deburred all of the HS-1004, HS-904, and HS-905 ribs a few days ago during some downtime, allowing me to blast right through an otherwise lengthy and tedious deburring task. All that still needed to be done was cut out the special parts of four of the center ribs, bend the flanges to spec, and then make some wooden cradles to hold the HS upright as it is assembled. A short while later, I had the HS skeleton clecoed together, along with the skins set in place in their cradles:

The HS skeleton, next to the R and L skins set in their new cradles.

Today ended with clecoing the skeleton to the inside of the skins. Now for the first time, we have something that looks like a horizontal stabilizer!

Last pic of the day: End of section 8-8, step 8!