Matt's RV-7 Project

Today I deburred the holes and edges, and dimpled the holes, for both elevator skins. Tedious. My edge deburring method is to first use a vixen file to knock off the shear marks, then 220 and 400 grit sandpaper until the edges are smooth and all visible tooling marks are gone. It takes a while.

Then I shot some primer along the rivet lines. I think the combination of striped empennage skins along with striped ugly futon is rather fetching, don't you?

Then I primed all the elevator stiffeners and the E-615 trim reinforcement bracket. Mary came out and helped me clean parts, and to re-mark them after the acetone washes off the identifiying marks during the cleaning process.

It was way too hot for most of the day to venture into the garage/airplane factory, but after the sun went down I went out and finished deburring and dimping the elevator stiffeners. Here they are in all their glory. I'm pretty sure there are eleventy kajillion of them, or at least that what it seemed like at the time.

To avoid gouging up the stiffener webs (Do stiffeners have webs? Anyway, the part that's perpendicular the flange) I ground down one side of my female tank dimple die. I didn't have this problem with the rudder stiffeners, but the holes in the elevator stiffener flanges are just a little bit closer to the webs than they were on the rudder stiffeners. And since I have an extra female tank die I wasn't too worried about accidentally munging this one when I was grinding away at it.

Here I'm match drilling elevator stiffeners and the E-615 trim access plate reinforcment ring:

And now a word about suppliers. I had heard that if you order parts online from Van's, you can expect to see your package sometime after the turning of the next season. Boy is that ever true. I needed to replace a stiffener, so I ordered it through their website on Monday morning. On Thursday I got a tracking number from UPS, which shows a scheduled delivery date of next Wednesday! That's just inexcusable. I don't understand how, in this day and age, they can possibly be so slow – what are they doing, printing out the web orders and sending them over to the order department by regular postal mail? Apparently they are still stuck in the 80's up there in Oregon, so next time I guess I'll have to "call" them on the "telephone". What a quaint concept.

Contrast this with Avery Tools, from whose website I have often ordered tools at lunchtime on a Monday and had them waiting for me when I got home from work on Wednesday. Now that's service.

Ended up not having a lot of time to work on the airplane over the weekend, but when I did I was making elevator stiffeners. Way too boring for a photo.