Today started with work on the instrument panel parts. Lots of edge deburring on the support structure as it has tons of tabs that allow it to curve.
After all the edge work I clecko’ed the parts together, as you can see the center panel is offset down one hole, this allows the parts to be inserted into the fuselage and still give you access to the clecko’s. This panel will eventually be held into position with screws allowing you to remove it to work on your flight instruments.
I needed to countersink all the holes in the two side panels so that the instrument panel will lay flat.
I then clecko’ed the parts together and put them in their place.
Since I needed to put the windscreen roll bar in next and it’s not painted yet I moved ahead to the forward top skin and started working on those parts. There are two filler strips that make a lip for the forward baggage door to lay on when closed. I cleaned their edges and deburred them.
The top skin has two parts that need to be cut out, the first is the baggage door area and the second is the cut out for the glare shield above the instruments. I used my dremel to cut these out and clean the edges up.
I then cleaned up all the edges on the top skin and then clecko’ed the filler strips to the underside with just a couple of clecko’s. Then the skin got layer on top of the fuselage to start clecko’ing it in place. From this point I decided to clean up shop and grab the stuff I needed to paint the roll bar at home in the garage. I will get it painted tonight and have it ready for the next couple of days. A good day in the hangar!
I spent a whole day just getting orginized in the new shop and figuring out where to place things.
Next I needed to figure where to put the blueprints since I don’t have the counterspace like I used too. What I decided was to use some sort of easel and started to look for ones to buy. What I found I didn’t like so I decided to build a simple one to suit my needs. After making some measurements I headed to Home Depot to get the supplies. I spent a good part of the afternoon cutting and building this thing.
So I was ready to do some riveting. First up was to final drill the remaining holes for the windscreen rollbar where I had left off around 6 months ago.
Next up was to rivet the lower and upper forward baggage sides to the gear tower cross brace. Here we go starting off riveting the AN470 rivets which are the toughest in my opinion. I couldn’t use the squeezer so it was gonna be the gun and bucking bar. So i grabbed the tools and took a deep breath. With a gentle squuze of the trigger I set the first rivet perfect followed by the second. Feeling good I headed to the 3rd rivet and let my guard down with the gun. If you dont hold good pressure on the gun it can bounce off the rivet head and damage parts. This is exactly what I did and put 3 dents in the lower baggage side as can see in the photo. Ugh I hate when I do dumb things but this is what happens when you take 6 months off! The good thing is that I will probably cover this area with some type of carpet since it will take a beating with bags and tools for flights. Well I took a 10 minute break to clear my head and sulk in my error. Well they say these things add character to your aircraft, all I can say is my aircraft will have a lot of character! I then riveted the bottom baggage side to the side walls. At least these set perfect and look good! 🙂 I decided to clean up the shop and head out to have date night with my girl. Minor ding that will never be seen by most people and some progress. I feel good about getting back into the swing of building.
I didn’t spend 10 total hours on just the aft bulkheads. This post is a cumulation of several days of building. My girl, T, and I bought a new home and I recently sold my townhome in one day. So that means between flying, building and other stuff I have to pack and orginize all my house stuff. We close on my home at the end of May which is why I’m getting a jump start on stuff. In between boxing and wrapping I get a little RV work done in the Hangar. First up was the big move of the wings to my buddy Glen’s for storage until the house move. We had a UHaul trailer that I moved some left over stuff from Omaha. While I had the trailer we took advantage of it and loaded the wings.
The next day I received my smoke kit from Smoking Airplanes and inventoried it. I had bought a few camlock connectors, from Agrimart, that I wanted to see if I could use them to make removal of the tank easier. From the initial setup I think I will be able to make these work.
Along with the different connections I also had them turn the pump 90° clockwise sonthatbthe output would be facing forward for easier access. Another package that arrived was from Aircraft Spruce that had my brake master reservoir. The plans call for having one master reservoir and running plastic lines to each of the brake master cylinders on the rudder pedals. The ones I ordered are smaller and thread directly into the master cylinder for each of the brakes. This eliminates having the plastic lines and gives a nice clean look.
The only downside I can see with these reservoirs is that it limits the amount of forward movement if you put the rudder pedals in the furthest forward setting. This wouldn’t be a problem for me as I will most likely use the second or third setting which give me plenty of movement. So I grabbed the rudder pedal assembly and installed the master reservoirs. Once I was happy with how they looked I installed the rudder pedal assembly into the forward fuselage.
Moving on the next task was to install the aft upper bulkheads. Before I could do this I needed to take care of two tasks, the passenger shoulder harness connection points and the tiedown ring guesset. The harness attach points are pretty easy as you really just need to clean up the edges and carve out some of the end material to allow them to sit flush with the underside of the aft skin whil overlapping the bulkhead flange.
The tie down ring gusset was next. This gusset if structural support behind the passengers backrest bulkhead and the upper longeron. You also have the option of putting in a tie down ring storage in this spot. This is for the Van’s tie down rings that are meant to be removed before flight and stored here. If you can remember I went with smaller aftermarket ones that can stay in all the time. I still went ahead with the plans just in case I ever wanted the bigger rings I would have this done now. I bought som 3/8″ thick bar stock from McMaster Carr and cut and drilled per the dimensions. I then grabbed my tap set and tapped for 3/8″-16 threads needed.
Before riveting those in-place I put them on the bulkhead and matched drilled the longeron’s.
A couple days later I was finished with priming, painting and riveting all these parts.
Next I installed the upper flap moter bracket and installed the flap moter. I didn’t instal the lower end as the floors are not in yet.
From there I wanted to see if I needed to trim the bottom of the VS at the forward end. Some builders, including Glen, had to trim this a little as the skin was in contact with it. I guess I was lucky as mine was just fine. When I called T to come look at the progress she made me get in a shot. 😀
As with this entire build I got to take all the parts off including the VS so I could work the up and down travel of the elevators. There are two travel stops, one for the up and one for the down. These limit the travel of the elevator horns and can be adjusted. The forward movement or down elevator has a limit of between 20°-25°. As mine stood with no change I was at 23°. Due to the horns not being matched only the left one hit the stop when you really want both. After discussing this with my buddy I decided it’s not a big deal as it would be very rare if at all that you would got that stop in flight. So I left it as is and worked on the aft or up stop. This one could be hit inflight especially in acrobatics so I would work at it to get both hitting. The final product was to trim the right side of the stop to almost flush and the left about 1/4″ remaining. I angled both sides so that most of the flange of the horns came in contact. I achieved 26.8° with the range between 25° and 30°. I’m happy with this result.
Last night I decided to do a little work which consisted of installing the rudder cables. There are two protective sleeves one for the aft exit hole and one for the section that lies next to the passenger foot wells. You start from the aft end and feed the cable through snap bushings and holes in all the bullheads. Before going through the center section you need to secure the end of the protective sleeve to the floor support snap bushing. You drill a small hole in the sleeve and zip tie it to the bushing and bracket.
After feeding it through all the holes I went back to secure the aft end with an Adell clamp.
Here is a view of the cables running the length of the fuselage.
Some of you may notice an error in the last photo…yep I installed the forward sleeve aft of the secure point! It should be forward of that point and go into the yellow center section there by protecting the cable for the foot well. Not a big deal and I just cut the zip tie’s and slid them forward, put a new hole in that end and re zip tied them.
So that’s my multi day post. These next 5 weeks will be spuradic as I close on my home in 3 weeks and close on our new home in 5 weeks. That means reduced a Hangar time and a couple of weeks of no hangar time when we are homeless! I’ll try my best to keep you updated.
Today started with work on the passenger seat back. There was a lot of edges that needed deburring including all the relief notches.
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I scuffed, cleaned and primed all these parts.
In between the priming coats I got to work riveting the pilot seat back. I did not rivet the bottom support angle as it also gets riveted to the hinge and I didn’t want to paint the hinge. I will paint those two parts separately and then rivet those parts together.
So I still had time to kill between priming so I started looking at the cockpit rails and how the riveting would go. I grabbed several of my pneumatic squeezer yokes and started mocking up the process. I felt like I had a pretty good plan for the process and decided to start this task. I carefully clecko’d the rails in place so that I didn’t scratch the paint. I then placed painters tape on the areas where I thought I might scratch the edges. I also used back riveting tape over the rivet heads so the squeezer dies wouldn’t scratch the paint.
I started with the rivets over the center section bulkheads. I worked on the left side then the right as I had the squeezer set for the specific length rivets.
I worked my way down the length of the rails taking my time so I didn’t scratch any areas.
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They all turned out perfect! Hopefully I can keep them looking as good for the rest of the build. I will put some type of padding on these and tape them down to protect them. I then grabbed the seat back support bar plates and clecko’d them in place. I had to think about how I would get to the backs of these rivets as the space towards the top of the brackets is pretty tight. To get the right angle for my hand and my tungsten bucking bar I needed to be inside the fuselage. I grabbed a scrape piece of wood to make a seat across the floor ribs and put all the tools inside for me to reach. I then climbed in and got into position. It wasn’t easy but I was able to get al of them done. I did chip the paint on the right side a little and will have to do some touch up work later.
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I finished the priming on the passenger seat back and started the riveting.
I did as much as I could with the squeezer and stopped since it was late and the rest of the rivets need the rivet gun and bucking bar. I grabbed the pilot seat back and hung the parts on the rack and painted them for the last task of the day.
So this post is for a few days worth of work over the last week or so since I got back from vacation/flight training. I got back to work in the Hangar this last weekend and the first task was to torque the 9 bolts/nuts on each gear leg. My buddy Glen helped out with this difficult task. The hardes part was getting to the 2 NAS nuts that reside on the outboard bracket of the hear tower. These are in a very tight location and make for fun time working on them. You remember the gear tower mod  I did way back when, well it was for just this task. I found that removing the 2 screws that reside just above these nuts made it a little easier to get the socket on them. After a couple of hours we had all tightened and to their specs. The NAS nuts needed to be set to 240 in/lbs and the rest were to their required bolt specs. The two NAS bolts tighten down the U shaped bracket that holds the outboard section of the gear down. The strength comes from the bridge section of this U shape. So you don’t want the outer legs of this bracket to touch the wear plate before you reach the 240 in/lbs torque. Vans says a minimum .030in gap is allowed. I have read where builders actually had to grind the brackets a little to prevent them from bottoming out before the torque was reached. I did not have this problem, the problem I ended up with was I didn’t get the recommended 1.5 threads showing above the the nut. I got 3/4 to 1 threads showing with the proper torque.
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Now that the RV was on its new legs I decided to tackle the firewall edge sealing. If you remember a post when I reviewed the forward side skins you were supposed to put a layer of ProSeal along the corner of the firewall to create a seal so gas, oil and fumes don’t enter the cabin. I thought this would end up pretty messy and thought I could do a better job later in the build. That time was now so I grabbed the new items I bought just for this task. I ordered a 4″ x 3/16″ nozzle from Sky Geeks website and a tube of ProSeal from Aircraft Spruce.  I clipped the straight end of the nozzle to a 45° to make the application a little easier.
Here you can see the light shining thru the holes in the relief notches in the firewall. This is looking forward from inside the cabin.
I used the Semco gun to lay a nice clean bead of ProSeal along the seam from top to bottom thanks to the small thin nozzle.
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The next day I grabbed the Andair fuel valve and the structure I built to support it. I left the inboard 2 holes at 1/8″ as I knew that the placement would move a little after the side skin was riveted in place. After placing the structure in place the holes were pretty close, so I open them up with the #19 drill bit for #8 screws. Now that those holes were matched I remove the structure and put two nutplates on the ends of the structure for the new holes. I also countersunk the holes on the left cabin mid braces to accept the #8 screws holding this structure so that they would lay flush.
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I then finished replacing the fuel system parts that were removed to rivet all the skins.
I also put the battery rack with its support parts in place.
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To continue with the build you start with the cockpit rails (sills) and rivet them in place. I had painted these prior to heading to flight training but they got a little fuzzys on them. So I sanded them and repainted them last week. As soon as I sprayed them they bubbled up and created orange peel. I have no idea why Rustoleum does that after 2 weeks but it did. So I grabbed the MEK and stripped them bare and restarted. So they turned out great this time and will let them cure for several days before riveting them. So I skipped ahead to the next steps which are the two seat back structures. I started with the forward seat back and separated all the parts followed by deburring all the edges.
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The two holes at the bottom of the seat back are for the seat belt attach points to stick thru. You have to remove part of the tabs that are inside of these holes.
I then scuffed, cleaned and primed the parts. I will rivet all the parts together next. These parts will not be used in the final airplane as I plan on using an after market interior by Clasic Aero which incorporates this structure inside its seats. But I will have these to put in during aerobatics when I will be wearing a parachute and need the extra room eliminating the cushion on the back. These seatbacks attach to the floor with a hinge, so removing the hinge pin allows for the back to be removed very easy.
After all the edge work I clecko’ed the parts together, as you can see the center panel is offset down one hole, this allows the parts to be inserted into the fuselage and still give you access to the clecko’s. This panel will eventually be held into position with screws allowing you to remove it to work on your flight instruments. 
I needed to countersink all the holes in the two side panels so that the instrument panel will lay flat. 
I then clecko’ed the parts together and put them in their place. 
Since I needed to put the windscreen roll bar in next and it’s not painted yet I moved ahead to the forward top skin and started working on those parts. There are two filler strips that make a lip for the forward baggage door to lay on when closed. I cleaned their edges and deburred them. 
The top skin has two parts that need to be cut out, the first is the baggage door area and the second is the cut out for the glare shield above the instruments. I used my dremel to cut these out and clean the edges up. 
I then cleaned up all the edges on the top skin and then clecko’ed the filler strips to the underside with just a couple of clecko’s. Then the skin got layer on top of the fuselage to start clecko’ing it in place. 
From this point I decided to clean up shop and grab the stuff I needed to paint the roll bar at home in the garage. I will get it painted tonight and have it ready for the next couple of days. A good day in the hangar! 
