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.