Matt's RV-7 Project

Hey, where'd this airplane-piece-shaped thing come from? I temporarily clecoed the middle and end ribs and front/rear spars of the horizontal stabilizer together to check the bends in HS-710/714 (front spar reinforcements) and HS-702 (front spar). Everything looked good so I drilled the reinforcements to the spars. Not shown are the steps of trimming the inboard flanges of each half of HS-702 to make room for the reinforcement angles, and deburring/straightening/fluting the ribs.

Actually here is a photo of the rib fluting crew hard at work:

Marked and cut the relief notches in the HS-404 inner nose ribs to make room for the reinforcement angles here as well. Had to stop using the air tools since it was getting late and I didn't want to annoy the neighbors, so these will be deburred tomorrow along with their cousins.

Okay, I said I was going to build the vertical stabilizer first, but then I got to those @#$% AD4 rivets in the VS spar. I was resisting the purchase of a pneumatic squeezer, but that only lasted till about the third one of of those suckers. I guess I could hit them with the rivet gun, but I'd just rather squeeze 'em, so pneumatic it is.

So, while I wait on my rebuilt pneumatic squeezer to arrive from the Yard Store, I switched to the horizontal stabilizer. I figure I can get some prep work done there in the meantime. Here I've deburred and polished out the milling marks from the HS rear spar reinforcement bars:

…and match-drilled them to the rear spars:

Drilled the rivet holes for the center elevator bearing:

And, since I must wait on the squeezer to smash those rivets too, it's on to the front HS spar reinforcement angles. Drilled them to the front spars, then marked and cut the tapered sections. Not shown is the half-hour with the hacksaw and vixen file, plus bad language, that it took to get them looking so nice:

Then the ears on the reinforcement angles get bent to exactly 6 degrees to accomodate the sweepback of the front spars. The manual calls for you to clamp the ears in between wood blocks and beat on them with a hammer, but I found the aluminum was soft enough that I could just clamp the parts at the bend line in a padded vise and bend the ears by hand.

Note the aircraft-quality angle bending template.