Back in the saddle! Elevator work continues.

I'd like to thank all my friends for hanging in there while real life took me away from this project.  :)   Progress has been slow, but I've finally reached a point where I can show you some good pictures. Enjoy!

We left off last time with elevator stiffeners completed and ready to rivet. Now, the elevator skins have been drilled, dimpled, deburred and primed. The stiffeners have beed attached, trim servo/hatch/mounting plate are finished, and the skins have been bent. The biggest lesson I learned during this phase was to SLOW DOWN! I ended up having to replace both the elevator skins with new ones, mainly from placing artificial deadlines on myself and trying to go too fast when i was WAY too tired. $165 mistake if you include shipping, but lesson learned- on with the show.    ;)



Here, we see the skin stiffeners being test-fit to the right-hand skin. All parts are ready for riveting.

The stiffeners are then back-riveted in place, same as with the rudder. Shop heads turned out nice.

Since I chose the electric trim option, the next step is to get the trim mounting plates and servo installed. Here's the Ray Allen servo.

The servo gets match-drilled to this hatch...

Then the hatch gets screwed to this plate (notice the nutplates attached here). The plate is riveted to the left-hand elevator skin, and serves double duty by also acting as a stiffener for the skin.

 

This photo shows me using two cleco-clamps to hold a servo-mount for drilling. Six holes in all were drilled, three for each mount. Then the mounts were riveted to the hatch, and the servo attached with 4 screws and nylon locknuts. In order to avoid the servo-to-mount spacing issues that some builders have documented, I used shorter AN426AD3-3 rivets in the 2 rearmost holes. This gave me just enough clearance, and the shop heads were still within spec.

  

 

 Here's a shot of the completed servo assembly, attached to the skin and ready to go.





Another pic of the servo, and a view of how the mounting plate looks from the outside. 

 

 And here's how the hatch looks when installed. The photo looks ugly; it's much prettier in person :)

 The last task that I'll document in this section is the bending of the skins, using my home-made bending brake. High-tech stuff involving 2 pieces of wood and a few door hinges. No pics of the bent skins, but everything went well.

  

 So, that brings us up to date! Now the spars, ribs, and control horns will be installed, and work will begin on the trim tab. Check back after the Holidays... I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Take care, all.

Dimpled elevator stiffeners

I'm on call @ work this weekend, so not enough time to do any meaningful RV-7 work... but progress is progress, right?

Here are a couple of shots of the dimpled stiffeners. The DRDT-2 made quick work of these.

More later. Hope everyone has a great weekend.  :)

Elevator skins/stiffeners match-drilled, deburred, primed, etc.

Hey everyone, it's been a while! Been putting in consistant 60-hr weeks @ work, and traveling- which left precious little time for anything else. All I've managed to get done is to match-drill the stiffeners to the elevator skins.

Like before with the rudder, the elevator stiffeners are fabricated from prepunched lengths of alclad stock.

Cut to length and shaped accordingly, they are then edge-finished, radiused, and match drilled to the skins. The metal shears are used in combination with the Scotch-Brite wheel, as usual.

Here is how they look when all the cutting and shaping is finished- nice and smooth.

Here you can see the scrap that has been trimmed from the raw stock.

Again, as with the rudder, the completed stiffeners are clecoed to the elevator skins and match-drilled. You have to pay careful attention to the plans, as some of the stiffeners get trimmed again to match their respective control surface, and then you have to mark ALL of the stiffeners so you can remember their individual locations- otherwise your holes will never match up again!  :)

Here's a skin with the stiffeners clecoed to it.

And here are all the stiffeners- deburred, match-drilled and primed.

Next steps will be to dimple all stiffeners & skins, and back-rivet them into place. At the rate things are going, you might want to check back in October! Take care, all  ;) 

Rudder: Completed, with a sigh of relief!

                             

                                      Welcome back, all. I hope everyone had a great 4th! 

The rudder sub-assembly was a lot of work. Only had a couple of minor bobbles along the way, and everything turned out OK in the end. I am a little disappointed in how my trailing edge turned out; nothing structurally wrong, and the edge is nice and straight... just not happy with the cosmetics of the double-flush rivets. For some reason, they ended up a little offset in their dimples. Oh well, it is what it is! On to the fun stuff.

     Here we have a 1 oz Proseal tank sealant kit from Van's. You mix it just like epoxy, and it cures into something similar to vulcanized rubber. It can also be used to tack assemblies together prior to riveting, making it easier to get good results.

At this point, I've mixed the Proseal, applied it to both sides of the AEX wedge, and clecoed the trailing edge together using match-drilled aluminum channel on each side to keep everything straight. After the Proseal cures, the channel will be removed and the T.E. will be riveted.

      Here's a shot of the T.E. with the clecoes removed and weights on top, ready to be back-riveted.

And here's the finished product. Not my best cosmetic work, unfortunately- but the trailing edge is nice and straight. The riveting was done using a combination of a back rivet set and a swivel mushroom set.

The next task is to roll the leading edge of the rudder, allowing it to mate properly with the Vertical Stab. I didn't get any pics of the actual rolling, but in a nutshell: you tape a length of 3/4" pipe to the leading edge skins, and use a vise grip to roll the skins with the pipe. This creates a nice smooth radius, which couldn't be achieved by simply bending the skins.

But first, there's a detail to attend to. I purchased an edge roller tool from Cleaveland Tools, it looks like this. It is used to create an ever-so-slight bend on the top skin (the one that will overlap), thus creating a very nice, smooth seam when the Leading Edges are rolled.

                                                    Here's a view of what this tool does.

You see here how nice the seam turned out; I'm happy with it  :)   Blind rivets are used to finish it off.

And the only thing left, aside from fiberglass work (which is going to wait), is to attach the swivel eyes which make up the hinge/attach points for the rudder. 

 Here's a swivel joint nestled snugly in it's place. A jam nut is used to secure it; I also applied a bit of blue Loctite to the bolt threads for extra security.

       The finished product. It gets hung from the ceiling now along with everything else. I'm glad it's finished- on to the elevators!

Rudder's almost done

Well, we're almost at the point of rudder completion- the only major task left is riveting the dreaded trailing edge!  I'll be looking for a length of steel for a bucking surface for this, as I've read elsewhere that one of these can be pretty helpful to have. Also, I think I'll be using the '2 pieces of aluminum channel method' to sandwich the trailing edge while the Proseal cures, as shown on Mike Nipp's website. Good tip!

My friend Tareque stopped by the shop on Saturday, and brought my new friends Jeff and Aswin along for a tour. They had a lot of good questions, and it was good to meet some new people. Come back anytime and help out, guys  :)


Here, we have the rudder skeleton parts laid our after all pre-finish work and priming. Let's get to riveting!

The first thing to do is bind the doublers and nut plates to the spar.

Here I am squeezing a rivet on the rudder horn using my longeron yoke. This was quite a metal sandwich; I think it was 4 pieces thick if you count the nut plate. That's a lot of dimpling and countersinking!

 

All finished here. This is a good shot of a nut plate- a piece of hardware that I'd never seen before starting this project. Eventually there will be swivel eye bolts installed here, which will form the hinge for the rudder.

Back at the top of the spar, I clecoed the counterweight rib to the spar, and then the counterweight skin to the rib. The rib got riveted to the spar, and the skin to the rib only (not the spar) for the moment. 

And, here's the lead counterweight bolted to the counterweight rib. I've read where other builders have had to trim this weight a bit in order to make it fit, but I had no difficulties. Hope I didn't use up all my good luck! I used my torque wrench here to get 25 in/lbs of torque on the bolts.

Now we start riveting on the skins. Let me say this right here: I am very grateful to all who have gone before me, and documented their RV projects so well. Without all the excellent information out there, I would doubtless have made many more mistakes on my own kit. Thanks to you all! Here's a closeup of where the counterweight skin interfaces with the main rudder skin, spar, and counterweight ribs. There are several different AN426 rivet lengths use here, so i borrowed Brad Oliver's idea and marked up the areas to be riveted. I used the 4" no-hole yoke on my squeezer for 99% of the skin rivets.

 

Here's a good shot of the top rib, secured to the skin. Note the Pop rivets used to attach the rib to the spar.

Almost done with the top rib/skin riveting.After two failed attempts at getting AN rivets in there, I ended up using blind rivets on the last 2 holes- oh, well.

Here's a nice view of the rudder bottom; control horn, horn brace, and bottom rib. All these were set with th e 4" no-hole, except for inside the horn brace- I used my longeron yoke there.

And here we are! In reality, all the clecoes are gone now, replaced with rivets. The only tasks left are riveting the trailing edge, rolling the leading edge, and a few other details which I'll document in the next installment. As always, any questions and constructive comments are encouraged. Hope you're enjoying this project as much as I am!

Due to business travel and a camping trip I'll be taking a break for a few weeks. Enjoy the summer weather, everyone! Seeya soon  :0)