October 24, 2020
Man oh man, I thought by early afternoon I’d have both Elevators buttoned up (sans the leading and trailing edges). Ha! The counter-balance attachment (with six tough to reach rivets and rivets of various sized to keep track of) slowed me to a crawl as did Short story, right side is 100%, left side needs the counter-balance and rivets requiring…
October 23, 2020
The day started deburring the remaining parts for the Horizontal Stabilizer followed by dimpling the skins. Sweet Jesus are there a lot of holes to dimple. Then priming prep followed by priming the last Horizontal Stabilizer parts. Not to be forgotten the front and rear spars holes were countersunk. Back to the Elevators, I riveted the ribs and then installed…
October 22, 2020
The day started with a few hours of deburring ribs. Not my favorite part of the build, then I primed a bunch of parts and set them aside to dry. I deburred the edges of the HS skins and then marked with tape the holes that are not to be riveted. Then came the assembly of the entire HS stabilizer,…
October 21, 2020
The morning started with priming parts for the Horizontal Stabilizer. Then an exciting step, hung the QB wings in the rack and got the aileron bracket and Garmin autopilot servo installed. A good chunk of the day was spent assembling the Horizontal Stabilizer Front and Rear spars. Quite a lot of riveting and even more to come. But my riveting…
October 20, 2020
Why not follow up yesterday’s mistake with another one, grrr. After spending 1.75 hours fabricating the Front HS Spar brackets I realized that I failed to cut the base down to 1″ from 2″ which meant I removed too much material. So I got to make another set. Blerg. Good news is that I knew what I was doing and…
October 19, 2020
So after all the prep work on the Elevator trim tab when trying to fold the trailing edge I messed it up. It wouldn’t affect the flight characteristics but visually it would always bother me, so I will rather redo it. Ugh. But it was bound to happen at some point. “Employment” work and helping another builder cut 3 hours…
October 18, 2020
So it was nice and quiet, just me in the hanger today and I was productive. I was able to finish up all the final prep work, knock out the three remaining skins that needed ribs riveted, and then rivet in the rear spar on the Elevators. That finished I cut the Elevator horn weights before moving on the last…
October 17, 2020
After playing hokey for five days to go mountain biking in Moab it was back to work. Cleaned up the tailcone light mounting before continuing the riveting the the Elevator trim tab bracket and the Elevator ribs.
October 15, 2020
Needed a little break from the plane building after 14 days straight. And truth be told Carl on SkyPond and I had been planning this trip for a long time. Carl is a stud and has ridden Moab trails for the past twenty years making him the ideal guide, or so I thought. Let’s just say he loves the extreme…
October 11, 2020
So I didn’t expect this step to take so long. Total of 8.25 hours for the three light, well technically five light boards. The tail frustrated me, there is an aluminum “C” bracket to attach the light. The problem was it was too big to fit the Van’s supplied tail cone. I sanded fiberglass, ground aluminum and after 90 minutes…
October 10, 2020
Lots of riveting today. My skills are slowly improving and there were only a couple rivets that I had to redo. The day started with priming the Elevator skins. And finished with work on wing tip light installation from FlyLEDs (needed a break from the riveting).
October 9, 2020
So evidently there are a number of small steps I had yet to approach, so Elevator work continued. Drilled the trim hinge and primed the smaller parts. Next I took on cutting and sanding foam blocks for the edge of the Elevator and Elevator Trim. Those took much longer than I would have expected. Oh and I also scuffed the…