Category: Process

Prepping Second Side Skin

Over the weekend I started preparing the port-side outer fuselage skin for installation. There are a few steps to do before installing it: Lightly abrade the skin near rivet locations (for better paint adhesion under the countersunk rivet head) Dimple the forward rivet locations Attach NACA duct Roll edges...

Bundling Wires with Lacing Cord

It’s a minor detail that you don’t usually see, but I like the finished look of neatly-bundled wire harnesses. While zip ties are convenient, they can damage the wire over time – under vibration, the edge of the zip tie chafes the Tefzel jacket, and eventually can cause intermittent...

Center Console Work

I’ve been pretty quiet with blog updates for the last 2 weeks as I’ve been doing a lot of research and planning for upcoming tasks: running wires, fuel lines, and brake lines. I wasn’t planning to have this all figured out by this point in the build, so this...

Flush Rivet Process

EDIT 8/5/2020: the AK41H rivets identified below won’t work. See my later post regarding the side skin install. Among other things, this past weekend I came up with a tool to dimple the holes where I intend to install flush rivets. I received my supply of AK41H countersunk rivets...

Wing Top Skins Riveting

Last weekend I riveted the upper skins on the left wing. As I did when clecoing the skins in place, I started riveting onto the strongest parts first (4mm rivets into the main spar cap), then ribs, then stringers. When pulling these blind rivets, it leaves an open hole...

Prepping More Wing Ribs

I spent about 4 hours over the last 2 days preparing a bunch more ribs for the wings. You can see page 9 of the manual in this picture, which is where all these ribs (and more) are required. I still need to prime the edges. We’ve had an...

Trimming Rivets

Working on the elevator trim tab now, and the instructions call for removing 4mm from the rivet body. Of course, the engineer in me insisted on a precise way to do this with a 3D-printed tool to hold a bunch of the rivets and then run them under my...

Process Makes Perfect

After about 2 days of drying, my freshly-primed parts for the horizontal stabilizer started showing spider lines in the paint, then flaking off and looking like this horror: It took me a while to figure out what went wrong, but it looks like I failed to properly clean the...

Primer test

Before I decided to buy a kit plane, I had no idea that there were so many choices for priming metal parts (or even to prime at all!). But given the New England weather, I decided I’m going to prime mating surfaces. I’m going with SEM Self Etching Primer...