It’s been a little bit since I’ve been able to work on my plane – work has been busy (including an overnight trip), but I’ve also been taking advantage of the nice weather lately, doing some outdoors stuff  like biking, hiking & pool days. I spent about an hour...

I’m buying a second rivet gun – as I mentioned in my earlier post, it’s pretty common for assemblies to use both 3.2mm and 4.0mm rivets.  Changing the bit on the rivet gun is a little annoying (even if it doesn’t take too long) – it’s about the same...

Good productive weekend! I primed and started assembly of the elevator, starting with the trim tab. I ran into a hole misalignment with rib #1 on both sides, looks like other builders have encountered this too. I decided to use a #20 drill bit to fix this – the...

This seemed to be much easier than filing down 26 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...

After coming back from a long Memorial Day Weekend trip to Sedona, AZ, I finished riveting the skins on this weekend. About 500 rivets in total. The trickiest part was (again) getting the holes in the skin lined up just right with the holes in the ribs and channels...

After having to slightly modify my priming process yet again (story for another post), I started clecoing the skins onto the HS frame. First side goes on pretty easily… …But when flipping over to the other side, it’s a tight fit, and initially the holes don’t line up since...

I got most of the horizontal stabilizer assembled this past weekend, save for the skins. Everything went together fine. I learned it’s a little tricky to get holes lined up just right for all the rivets to fit – especially when lining up overlapping parts with many holes, like...

I decided on the RAMI AV-12 antenna to mount inside the VS. This antenna is optional, however I plan to fly IFR and want to be able to fly ILS approaches, which, for the moment, are still pretty common. It was hard to decide which antenna to get, but...

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...