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.