Mary came out and helped me rivet the last of the wing skin rivets in place. The wings are now officially riveted together. We put a couple dings in the skin (again) but it's nothing that paint won't hide.
Then I put the left wing onto sawhorses so I can work on getting the fuel tank cover plates finished:
RV hopeful Dave Blair came to check out the project and help rivet on the left wing's outer bottom skin. He got the hang of the rivet gun pretty quickly. By dinnertime we were cranking the rivets out one after another.
Don't be fooled – this is a lot less comfortable than it looks:
We got it about three quarters finished. I'll pester Mary to help me drive the last few dozen rivets sometime this week.
We put about the same number of dings in this wing as the other one that got riveted last week. Meanwhile, the pre-riveted part of my quickbuild wings have exactly one small surface imperfection that I've been able to detect. How in the world do the quickbuild factory people do such a flawless job? Do they have some kind of ultra precise robotic rivet-driving laser beam out there in the Philippines?
Tonight I installed the parts for the flap positioning system. This is an optional cockpit convenience item, and is not absolutely necessary for flight – however, I really wished I had one when I had the last RV, so into this airplane one will go.
The normal flap system involves a toggle switch that you press and hold to move the flaps up and down; you keep holding the switch until the flaps get to where you want them to be. This is the same arrangement as early Cessna 150's and my old Grumman, among others.
Instead of that setup, my airplane will have this sensor thingy attached to the flap motor – a very clever and simple arrangement involving a machined rod sliding between two microswitches – and a control box mounted nearby. Bumping the flap switch briefly down will automatically lower the flaps one notch each time, and flipping the switch to the up position will run them all the way up. Very cool.
I mounted the control box to the inside of the seat back brace with screws and nuts. It's kind of a pain the way the flap motor and control box are permanently wired together – it certainly makes handling these parts problematic. I'll probably cut the wire bundle and splice in a connector so the flap motor can more easily be removed for maintenance.
Fellow KC-area builder Scott came by this afternoon to help rivet the outer bottom skins onto the wings, which is a task I've been procrastinating on for a while.
I had the long skinny arms so I got to buck all the rivets. Long sleeves are a must for this job. Also, this picture makes me hungry for Cozy burgers.
We planned to get both wings done in a couple hours, but we ended up taking all afternoon to get only one wing finished. We'll do the other one some other weekend.
This one didn't turn out too bad, although there are some dings and smilies here and there (especially back by the rear spar where it's hard to buck). Paint will hide them though. We only had to drill out two rivets, both of which were due to us misreading the callouts and using rivets that were too short.
Here's a collection of pieces that had to be fabricated for the flap motor mount:
The flap channel gets fitted thusly. The plans call for the joint plate at the top to be bent to an angle of 151.8°. Yeah, whatever – we're not building the space shuttle here. I just adjusted the bend angle until everything fit and drilled it in place.
Here's a shot of the rear side of the flap channel, where the motor pivot bolt goes through. The angle bracket is a little crooked, but that's how the motor geometry worked out. I've seen this on other builders' sites so I don't think it's a problem.
The motor can run the flaps through the entire range of motion without binding or rubbing anywhere. This is up:
This is down:
I got the side panels mostly fitted before calling it a day. With everything in place the flap motor has a little house to live in. I still need to deburr the side panels.
On the left side, you have to notch the side panel to clear the pivot bolt head. I clamped a piece of scrap aluminum to the edge of the cover and used a unibit, which worked well.
