Fitting the aileron brackets - 2 hours

Not a huge day, but I managed to fit up the aileron hinge brackets. It was fairly easy to figure out the correct parts, but it took a bit of head scratching to figure out where exactly the flush rivet heads go. Of course I was warned out some confusion when reading some of the gotchas on the forums. I think I psych'd myself out a bit with the forums. But in the end, if you read the plans and CAREFULLY read the small plans addendum that van's gives you on the hinge, then it all falls into place.



Once I had everything marked out, I cleaned off all the shear marks. I also cut up the aileron hinge stiffener and cleaned up the edges. Since I had the bandsaw out, I cut up the aileron stiffeners and cut up the rough shape.

Began assembly of flaps - 2 hours

 Since the most inboard flap ribs where all primed, it was time to start riveting the assembly together.I started with setting the nutplate onto the rib. Then, came setting the doubler on the rib. All in all it went pretty smoothly and I was pleased with the results.



So I wanted to get going on the flap assembly and prime the rest of the parts. One item that needs to be done is to prep and dimple the parts before priming. (With the self-etching primer, dimpling after priming has a tenancy to flake the primer off). I dove in and started dimpling, but I noticed after I was done that I had the male tank dimple die in the squeezer with the regular female die. So i changed out the male die and re-dimpled thinking it was no big deal.

Well low and behold.... I have cracks in my dimples for flap ribs #2 thru #6 both sides. Crappy! Time to order new parts.

Finished work on the wing cart - 10 hours

Big long day on the wing cart. Now I will admit that i am way overboard on the cart. It is overbuilt. but considering that I have to move the wings out of the garage and put them on transport to storage. A strong solid wing cart is WAY better than a flimsy wing cart.

I began the day by dissembling the wing stand.


I then started to cut down the various pieces to the suggested dimensions on the VAN's drawings. Next I started to assemble the leading edge support structure and installed the castors.

Took me some head scratching to figure out how high to mount the inboard spar holder to get a nice level wing. But after some thought and measuring I figured it out and cut the plywood. I then fit it to the cart frame.

I test fitted the wings at this point to ensure that all was correct and I then removed the outboard support brackets that were installed to fit the wing stand.

Next I wanted to stiffen the support structure, so I fastened gussets to the frame.

Now...To fill in the leading edge support. I had bought some 1/4" plywood and scored the backside to allow me to curve the wood.



The depth of the cuts where quite deep.

But this allowed me to follow the leading edge curve quite nicely. I used lots of glue and brad nailed the skin to the contour.

Next. I wanted to secure the inboard spar to prevent the wing from sliding off the support. Now some build logs use bolts wrapped in duct tape and just stick in the spar holes as a method of securing the wing. This is just fine, however I wanted to do a little better, so I bought some 3/8" dowels and after using a cardboard template, I transferred the holes into the wing stand and installed the dowels.

Now....Mental note here. 3/8" dowels leaves no room for error as it is a tight fit for the wing spar. So after a test fit...I decided to lose 1 of the 2 dowels.... much more forgiving fit. I then painted the structure....of course no NEED to do this, but for it's clean and nice, so why not. I then used contact cement (3M #77 adhesive spray) and installed the foam padding.


 
And presto chango....I am done. Wow this cart is nice to move around.  Lots of work put in today....but worth it.

Starting work on building the wing cart - 1.5 hours

Now that the wing skins are nearly riveted and complete. (I just have the most outboard rib to complete). Its time to start getting them off the stand and into the cart. One of the things that I planned on doing with my wing stand is that it would easily convert into my cart by just cutting a few things off and moving them.

I took a piece of cardboard to take a template for the leading edge shape.



I then used that template (plus 1/2" positive offset) to layout the pattern on the end support structure. The outline is easily cut out using a jig saw.

Of course...I had to pick up these nice big locking castors when I saw them at home depot.

Finished riveting the left wing skin/rear spar - 5.5 hours

Big long night tonight for a weeknight. Since there are a handful of rivets I can't reach on my compact wingstand, I have to take the wing off the stand and lay it on a table. The easiest side is the inboard rib followed by the rear spar. I tackled these tonight, and I will leave the most outboard rib for last. I could try to do this myself but having a bucking partner would make it easier, so I'll just wait for help on that.

After I set up the pneumatic squeezer and got the right stool, I went to work on riveting the most inboard rib to the skin.

Next I began to chip away at the rear spar/skin. My method was to start putting in a rivet every second or third hole, and then began to remove clecos and then infill.






One of the things I noticed was that my rivets seemed to be slumping. Funny cause one of the things I do while squeezing is to watch the rivet 'bulge'. If the rivet is 'bulging' on both sides, then it is squeezing nice and straight. You can easily tell when it is being slumped as you can watch it happen....you can also stop squeezing and makes it easier to drill out and remove without stretching the hole. Of course these rivets were squeezing perfect, but they looked slumped to the left side.

When on closer examination I noticed that my dimples (from using the vice grip dimpler) put a halo ring on the bottom of the dimple that if shifted to the right, giving the illusion that the rivet shop head is not centered, when it actually is. Weird.

I then reached the point where I needed to upsize the rivet length as I was now into the doublers. Immediately I ran into headaches with the squeezer, so after drilling out the rivet I opted to buck the rivets. Well that went perfectly well. It was a slam dunk the whole way through.....

 
Until I reached the very last (inboard) rivet. Well...This rivet is the biggest pain to set in the entire build so far. The rivets and the thickness of the doubler above the hole make for a really tight area to buck. I managed to get 2/2 on the right wing set very nicely, but this wing I only got 1/2. The last one was just giving my absolute grief. I drilled it out about 4-5 times, to the point where I had to upsize it to an oops rivet. Which only makes the tight access situation worse. I tried everything I could including grinding down one of my tungsten bucking bars (crap!) In the end this is the result of the bucked oops rivet with the steel shoe bucking bar.
  

I decided not to mess with it anymore. I sent the pictures to an AME friend to ask his opinion, and called VANS in the morning. Both were in agreement that it is fine...not ideal...but fine. The consensus is that it is an ugly rivet...no doubt. but sometimes in the build one is going to run into a stubborn rivet that is just going to end up messy. So it's going to happen. the key is to minimize how often it happens. As tech support from VANS said - I don't see anything that worries me, but if you had 100 of those, then we need to talk.

Of course then next day...it never looks as bad as it did while you were in the situation. Sucks that it still happened, but in reality no plane is 100% perfect, and they fly just fine.

Completed the left wing top skin - 2.5 hours

Well huge difference today, compared with the last attempt a few days ago. Eugene stopped by this afternoon to lend a hand again at bucking the rest of the top skin rivets. All in all it went amazingly well. We had set all of the remaining top skin rivets. Only managed to drill out the odd rivet...maybe 4 or 5 in total. But the rivets look great....Finally back on track.

Started riveting top skin on left wing 3.5 hours

What an incredibly frustrating build day. Eugene had come over to lend a hand with setting the wing skin rivets. We started off alright. We needed to buck a handful of rivets on the Spar/Leading edge that I just couldn't get with the squeezer. Next, we mixed up about 35 grams of proseal and spread it all over the wing walk doubler, and cleco'd the skins on.

Now we were ready to begin the skins. I started off with using AN426AD3-4.5 rivets for the wing walk doubler as those were exactly the size needed on the right wing (it's .5 upsize from the plans). This made perfect sense as we had applied a thin layer of proseal to the wing walk doubler/underside of skin. However, the first few rivets just turned out crappy. They were folding over, so we would drill out and try again, this time it was worse. We just could not get them to work. We even switched gun and bar positions but it didn't solve it. In fact that was a worse idea since we were so comfortable in our positions from the previous right wing.

I must have drilled out about 30 rivets before we even had 3 wing walk doubler ribs done. JUST awful. At some point we figure out that the AD3-4.5 rivets were too long and we dropped down to AD3-4 rivets which were the right length and matched the plans, but it didn't really improve our success rate all that much. We figure that it must be a combination of the tank dimples that I used on the ribs and doubler and the addition of wet proseal that just made setting them difficult. Who knows.

Finally we battled enough to call it a day. We had set all of the rivets on the inboard top skin. 

Riveted the Bracket to the Flap Spar - 1 hour

Not much work today on the flaps, but I managed to rivet the FL706 brackets onto the flap spars. As soon as I was finished, Eugene had arrived to help set some rivets on the wing skins.

Started Priming Flap Parts - 2 hours

Since I have to wait for a day when I can get some help bucking the rivets on the wing skins, I decided to jump back over to the flaps. The manual has you rivet some of the pieces together before they go on the flap skins, so I need to do some priming. It was a nice day outside, so I set up all i needed to prep the spar and the brackets for priming.

The larger pieces got the wash in soapy water, rinse, MEK and prime. While the smaller pieces got an acid bath, MEK, and Prime.


Now we wait a day for it to dry and harden up.

Attaching the leading edge to the left wing/spar - 3 hours

It's so much faster the second time round. I made extremely quick work setting the cherry rivets in the leading edge ribs/spar. Not near the struggle I had last time and less scraping and bruising. That modified rivet pulled works great!

Once the ribs where set, I began to squeeze the rivets that attach the leading edge skin to the spar. I started in the middle and began to work my way out. The rivet call out on the drawings are perfect. Used 426AD3-4 for the majority, and upsized to AD3-4.5 where it also had to attach a rib flange.
A great evening with the garage door open made time fly-by.

Getting ready to install top skin on left wing - 2.5 hours

Nothing like an airshow to get you back motivated on building. I need to check level and twist on the wings to make sure all was good. This goes much quicker now as I know it like the back of my hand. The alignment is perfect.

So I started to cleco on the wing skins. Took a little bit of trying but I managed to get things sitting extremely well. The spar looks perfect when looking down the span. I put a cleco in every third hole.
Next step was to cleco on the leading edge.

The Edmonton Airshow 2016

I had volunteered to work the EAA booth for this years Airshow. So much of the week was spent on printing up pictures of various builds in the local EAA group so that I can post them up in the booth. I also decided to bring my vertical and horizontal stabilizer (The first empennage) to show at the booth. So much effort has gone into setting up everything for the show. I even brought a small compressor, squeezer and rivet gun to have riveting demonstrations.

We managed to get a Cozy 3 brought in front of the booth.

At least the kids had a blast!
 
 Of course my favorite plane made an appearance.