Daniel’s RV-7A

I began assembling the left aileron this morning.  I needed to find a way to dimple the leading edge holes for the counterbalance pipe.  I used a spare (and warped) non-adjustable set holder from my squeezer.  Worked like a charm.  Used a rubber mallet to hit the set holder, which had a male 1/8 dimple die in it.  I then set the CS4-4’s which layed down quite nicely.  Riveting the trailing skin to the spar was kind of a pain, but only cause I have big hands and the skin made some pretty nasty marks on the tops of my hands.  I tried wearing gloves, but can’t feel the rivet shop head when I do, so I went on without them…

Started on the Aileron today… Took the stiffners and cut/deburred them.   When I was finished, they looked like this: 

I then back-riveted the stiffeners to the skin.  Then, I match drilled the reinforcement plates, brackets, ribs, spar, and skins.  Deburred all of it, dimpled, and primed.  Tomorrow I will start putting it all together.

Today I match drilled, deburred, primed, and riveted the Aileron Attach Brackets.  Simple, yet productive.

The baffle showed up, and I got the tank put back together making sure to put proseal along the flange of the baffle.  Leak tested the tank and it held!  So I went ahead and attached the tank to the wing, bolted it all up, torqued, torque sealed, and ran all the screws in.  I also moved the wing out of the stand and into the wing craddle I made.  Im glad to finally be making progress!!

Well, after 2 attempts at getting a new baffle from Vans, I finally have one.  UPS did quite a # on the one they first sent… the box was hideous.  Reminded me of the scene in Ace Venture: Pet Detective where Jim Carey is pretending to be a UPS guy kicking the box around…

Man, I’m so tired of dicking with this tank that I’m going to fix it for good.  I drilled out every damn rivet on the rear baffle, ruined the baffle removing it (cured proseal is nothing to joke about, the shit is tough!)  So.  Now I am in the process of cleaning up the mating surfaces.  I’ve ordered a new baffle, and some more solid blind rivets.  This time, I WILL put a thin layer of proseal along the rear baffle flange even though the directions say not to.  This tank is not going to leak with I get this new baffle on… mark my words.

So, for some reason the attempt to fix my leaking rivets did not work.  So I tried the Loctite 290 (Green self–wicking) and could not get it to setup and cure.  Im tired of this tank.  Im fixing to take drastic measures to fix this thing….

Stopped by Harbor Freight today on the way home from work and picked up a 3″ & 4″ hole saw.  Cut a 3″ hole in the rear baffle of the fuel tank in the same compartment the leak was… cleaned up the edges with scotchbrite (and glad I did!, it would have sliced my hands to peices!)  After cleaning out all the metal shavings with a shop vac, I looked in with a mirror but couldn’t see a break in the fillet of proseal that would cause the leak… but I smeared some in the joint anyways.  Then I cut a 4″ round patch of .032″.  Drilled some holes, scuffed up the mating surfaces, slopped on some proseal, and buckled it all up using AD-41H blind rivets… Hopefully this tank is done!

Wow, what a big (and long) day in the shop today.  I’ve probably lost about 5lbs from all the sweating I’ve done this weekend, but this has definately been one of my more productive weekends on the wings.  Today I set out to rivet the inboard top skin on the left wing.  I already had it deburred, dimpled, and primed… so all I needed to do was find someone to help me out with the riveting and I’d be all set!  Gave my Dad a shot, but he is busy building a fence.  Asked (begged) Meagan, and she agreed to help me after she cleaned the house, did homework, and made cupcakes… So I head out to the garage and started tinkering.  And during all my tinkering, I managed to change the anti-freeze on my pickup, deburred, dimpled, and primed the top outboard skin, and got it cleco’ed into place… So now I’m thinking, maybe I can convice Meg to stay out here and do both skins!  (yea right!  but it’s worth a shot!)  So I go back in and hound her some more till she comes out and away we went.  I put her in charge of the rivet gun and I was in charge of the bucking bar.  The entire process was suprisingly smooth!  Of all the rivets that went in, only 3 needed to be drilled out!  All-in-all, it took us about 3 and a half hours, but ITS DONE!  I really didn’t expect to finish.  And WOW its really cool seeing this thing with no clecos!!!! 

Here is the outboard top skin being dimpled, and then cleco’ed into place…

And here we have Meg riveting her hands off… And then a pic of her finished work!

And here are the rest of the pics,  I look like crap cause I did nothing but sweat all day long, but hey - nobody said this was a glorious task!

Now that the leading edge is done, I attached it to the wing spar.  You sat the LE into place, and cleco it all down.  Then, the plans call for you to buck rivets for the rib to spar attatch points, however, it involves grinding down your double-offset rivet set, which I did not want to do.  After some research, I found that Vans suggests using LP4-3 blind rivets in place of the bucked rivets, which makes a lot more sense.  Bucking rivets would have been pretty difficult considering you have to reach in through the lightning holes and buck without being able to see squat.  So, I used the LP4-3’s and it was pretty painless.  The Leading Edge is now permanently attached to the wing.  :)  I also threw the fuel tank on there but only used a couple of screws to hold it down, since I still have leak to fix on in.