Empennage - More Rudder/VS Work

Started the evening by running my conduit line through the VS skeleton and fabricating two small brackets to hold the conduit in place between the lightening holes of the VS nose ribs. I forgot to take a picture of them, but they came out pretty good! This conduit will allow me to run lighting and/or antenna wires up to the top fairing of the VS if need be. I also installed a doubler in the top rib of the VS where the conduit terminates to strengthen that area. I primed all the newly made parts and riveted them all into place. The final thing I did to the VS before putting on the skin was to install a grounding nut plate, in case I decide to add static wicks (still undecided on that).

Next was the rudder. We got through the first 4 or 5 riveting steps in section 7, up to the back-riveting of the rudder skins. I'm saving that until after we get completely done with the VS, which is looking like it should be tomorrow. The rudder pieces went together fairly well, and we also added the grounding nut plate in about the same position of the rudder spar. The end of tonight's work on the rudder brought us here:

Sarah getting some more experience bucking rivets... she's doing great!

The control horn/bottom rib riveted together, and rudder spar with doublers and nut plates installed. Looking good so far!

The last thing I did tonight was start work on attaching the VS skin. I had been putting this task off because I wanted to make sure I had done everything I needed to before buttoning it up. After installing the conduit, redoing two of the rivets, and putting in the nut plate, it was ready to be closed in forever! I only got about halfway through it tonight, but I think it was the harder half with all those rivets near the leading edge that were kinda hard to get to with the bucking bar. I got all the rivets forward of the front spar done, as well as all the front spar rivets on one side. It looks like the rest should go pretty quickly tomorrow, and then I'll have my first completed part! Excited for that...

The current state of the VS. All leading edge rivets are complete, and one side's front spar is done (the side not visible).

View inside the leading edge of the VS, with the lower half of rivets complete. You can also see the conduit run going through the lightening holes.

Inside the VS looking forward, you can see the lower half has been riveted to the spar, and the conduit running through the front area.

The grounding nut plate, installed just above the middle hinge on the VS main spar.

The grounding nutplate, installed above the middle attach point on the rudder spar.

Empennage - Rudder - Day 3

Short day of work today. Finished dimpling the remaining rudder skin and then Sarah helped re-dimple the VS skin with the new hammer. It's hard to tell the difference unless you test-fit a rivet in the hole. After re-dimpling the rivet clearly sits flush in there, where beforehand some of the holes didn't let it quite fully set into place. Lesson learned! :-)

After dimpling, we did the typical acetone wash and priming routine. I used a little less primer this time than on the VS, only really focusing on the metal-metal contact points and then a lighter dusting elsewhere to conserve weight. This method might only conserve a few pounds at most throughout the whole plane, but hey, everything counts!

Tomorrow I'm going to try and button up the VS, and at least rivet together the skeleton of the rudder... should be an exciting day!

 The rudder skeleton after priming

The two rudder skins after priming.

Empennage - Rudder - Day 2

So I took the day off yesterday from doing any actual building. I did, however, have my EAA Chapter 33 Tech Counselor, Tom, over to my house for the first time to show him the workshop and what I've got accomplished so far. He seemed happy with just about everything, but he did point out that I haven't been hitting the dimpler hard enough with the hammer when dimpling the 0.025" thick skin of the VS. Good thing it isn't attached yet, should be really easy to run through the C-frame again, this time with a 2lb ball peen hammer. (I had previously been using a 3lb rubber mallet... apparently you don't want to use rubber mallets for the job, who knew?) The only other finding came when I pointed out 2 rivets on the VS main spar that didn't come out 100% perfect, and I wanted to know how close they were to rejection-level. He said they were fine as is but if I wanted to I could drill them out and replace them, just to get the practice and have the extra peace of mind. I figure I might as well, it can't hurt anything.

Last night I also ordered the parts for the rudder trim. This will be the first add-on I will be attempting that is not in Van's Plans. My idea for rudder trim will be to do something similar to Brian Steeves' post but use a longer pushrod and mount the servo closer to the front of the rudder to minimize potential control surface balance issues (but also the slightly larger/heavier/cheaper RA servo). There's also an interesting post going on currently on VAF that I'm paying close attention to, I might incorporate some of the things I'm reading in there too, we'll see. My bill of materials for rudder trim so far is as follows:

Ray Allen T2-7A Servo ($145.00)
Van's VA-195C/D inspection plate doubler and cover ($7.10)
Van's AN257-P3X3' hinge ($7.50) will only need about 7" of the 36" part
Avery fairing set ($16.00)
Click Bond Studs ($9.65)

On to today... we nearly completed the metalwork for the rudder. We started by clecoing on the skins to match-drill all 4 billion holes in the skin. The plans said to use a cleco in every hole, so that we did. Sarah and I spent the first half of this task figuring out a system to communicate which holes still needed to be drilled, and which ones needed a cleco removed or inserted after drilling, etc. By about the time we got the rhythm down, she wanted to switch roles from clecoing to drilling, and the learning process started over again :-). We're having great fun putting this stuff together though! And the resulting rudder appears to have come out quite straight and looks pretty neat:

The rudder with the skin fully clecoed into place. Notice the empty cleco bin on the stool to the right, we literally used every 3/32" cleco we had! Maybe it's time to buy more...

After finishing up all the match drilling and clecoing, it was time to tear it all back apart and begin the painstaking deburring and dimpling process. I set a cutoff time at midnight for today, which got us through everything except for dimpling one of the two skins. Should be about 20 more minutes of work tomorrow, then the rudder will be ready for priming and final assembly!

The parts needed to build an RV-10 rudder, minus one of the two skins. All parts here are cut, deburred, match-drilled, deburred (again), scuffed, dimpled, now ready for priming and final assembly!

Empennage - Rudder - Day 1

Well, after making a lot of great progress on VS Day 1, I feel like I've slowed down a little bit today. Staying up way too late last night finishing up this website, combined with the loss of an hour with daylight savings definitely didn't help. I have a feeling like there will be plenty more days like yesterday, and plenty more days like today yet to come!

So I decided to keep the skin off the vertical stabilizer for now and move on to the rudder. I'm still wanting to get a little more comfortable with the whole process and figured it won't hurt anything to leave them separate for now, and rivet it together another time. So... on to Section 7 - Rudder!

R-1003, R-1004, R-1010, and R-1015 parts, raw

The beginning of Section 7 involved quite a bit of metalwork. The top and bottom ribs needed to be separated from their raw stamped parts, along with the shear clips and each of the seven stiffeners needed to be cut to different lengths. Then each piece needed the usual deburring which seemed to take quite a while with all the little resulting parts. Here is what this same pile of parts became after about 3 hours:

R-1003, R-1004, R-1010, and R-1015 parts, cut and deburred

It was about at this point that my good friends Alec and Cody showed up to check out the project. It was great to do a little show and tell over the semi-complete VS, and walk through the whole process that I am just beginning to get the feel of. I've told all my friends that throughout this process I'm implementing an open-door policy: anyone who wants to come watch is more than welcome to do so, but they'll have to help out (at least a little)! So:

Never too cautious, Alec agreed to help by peeling the protective layer from the R-1002 spar assembly :-)

The rest of today's work was pretty straightforward: a little deburring work on the rudder horn and striker plates, and then clecoing all these parts together. It yielded this nifty piece of work:

That's actually pretty much it for today! Lots more work to do on the rudder, and still need to rivet on the VS skin at some point... Hopefully I'll get in a few hours each night throughout this week!

Empennage - Vertical Stabilizer - Day 1

So, today was the first day we began building our own airplane. Be warned that the caption of the below photo is a bit incorrect though, since the beginning of the build is neither called step one, nor is it on page one. It is called Section 6, which quite logically occurs immediately after sections 1-5. Sections 1-5 cover many of the prerequisites to embarking on such a project, including company/aircraft information, terminology, methodology, and just general information about exactly we've gotten ourselves into. Van's indeed seems to be very thorough in guiding their builders along, and I for one am very thankful for that! For all intents and purposes, though, Section 6 is really Step 1 for actually building something.

Page 1, Step 1!

I gathered all of the necessary parts for the vertical stabilizer, stripped off the blue vinyl protective sheeting, and began following the instructions that lay before me. I cut some aluminum angle to make R and L spar caps, and before I knew it I was neck deep in drilling/deburring, watching things take shape before my eyes!

These are the two VS spar caps, just after cutting them with the bandsaw.

The top of the spar caps, tapering away as you go upward.

The lower part of the same spar caps, beginning to get clecoed into place.

The VS rear spar, with caps, hinge brackets, and doublers all clecoed into place.

 

Adding in the front spar and the rest of the VS skeleton.

 

Clecoed and final-drilled the skin into place... just to have to take it all back apart again for more deburring, dimpling, and then priming for final assembly!

I've chosen to go with Rustoleum self-etching auto primer because it's relatively cheap, easy to work with, and my research seems to indicate it provides decent protection for the money. I considered other techniques like alodining or using a higher-dollar 2-part primer, but quite honestly I can't justify the cost in both time and money spent. Lots of planes are built around the world without any primer at all, and so I'm really not too worried about choosing this route over some other methods preferred by the primer purists-- this seemed like the best middle-of-the-road choice. For those who may not be aware, primers tend to be a volatile subject among aircraft builders... lots of differing opinions out on the forums that lead to lengthy discussions and spirited debates... me, I chose what I hope/believe is best for my purpose, but may not be the route others have taken or would/should take. Unless asked specifically, I promise this is the last time I'll discuss primers and choice/rationale here on this site!!!! ;-)

Priming is done, so that means it's time for rivet #1!!! Too bad it was for kind of a boring part: the rudder stop tabs. It was a good place to start, though. Here's the final part after putting the six rivets into place:

The first part I riveted together for my very own RV-10!

A few dozen rivets later, it was Sarah's turn to take a shot at it!

 

She's been busy assembling her Van's toolbox practice kit, but she took a quick break from that to help out with the front VS spar doubler plate. She did a great job!

After riveting the spars together and then (most of) the skeleton, we're ready to attach the skin! Time to call it a day, though. I have to say, things seem to be going more quickly than I thought they would. I'm not in any kind of rush, and would much rather take longer and make a quality build than go quickly and make mistakes... but today seemed to go very smoothly and we cruised right along through most of the steps. I can only assume that the SportAir workshops we attended are responsible for a lot of this progress made... all I can say is, if you're thinking about building a plane, take the class!

Empennage Kit Arrival - Inventory

It's here!!!!

No amount of preparation can make you ready for the moment that you first set eyes on the crate that contains physical parts of an aircraft that you will build and someday fly.

Minor snag: Turns out the crate was slightly damaged in shipping, but the driver was very nice about documenting its condition, and stuck around to make sure the contents were complete and undamaged, which indeed they were.

The damaged area of the crate was right in front of all the fiberglass parts, shown here still wrapped in their packing paper. There was no damage at all to anything inside the crate-- it was very well packed!

The contents of the RV-10 empennage kit... here is the tailfeather of my future bird! :-)

A few hours of inventory later, I had everything checked off from the packing list and split up into the main subcomponents (which I found to be very different than the "subkits" that the parts are packaged in): Vertical Stab, Rudder, Horizontal Stab, Elevator, and Tailcone.