a few more long days, 34 hours, 400 hours total

The last couple of weekends have been rainy so I got a few long days work in.
I also did some late nights after work during the week.
I estimate around 34 hours were put in over the last couple of weeks and that brings the grand total on the project so far to 400 hours.

I finished up the lower firewall, the bottom skin, the bottom corner skins, the front footwell area and started on the side supports and the infamous longerons.
It was all easy work, most of the time was spent priming, and now top coating too since there are visible cabin areas being assembled.
And of course riveting it all together.

The longerons are the long aluminium angle sections that run the full length of the fuselage area and tie together everything from the firewall to the tailcone.
They are obviously very important pieces, and are infamous amongst RV-12 builders as being one of the more difficult tasks of the whole project.

Vans supplies some 1/8th inch thich 3/4 angle about 8 feet long and a page of instructions on how to work the piece to the correct shape.
I actually found this to be a really fun part of the project, one of the best bits so far in fact.

First you have to open up the angle from 90 degrees to 95.4 degrees for the first 12 inches or so of the longeron, then you twist the angle 2.7 degrees so that the top is in line with the rest of the longeron, leaving the first 12 inches with an angle sticking out at 5.4 degrees.
You do that by bashing on it with a lump hammer with the sides on a concrete floor until it opens up.
fun !.
then you get a template for a curve and have to bend the longeron laterally to match the pattern by bashing it one inch at a time in a vice.
that twists the piece out of square on the top surface, so then you twist it back with pliers until you have a nice complicated shape for the edge of the fuselage.

I spent a few hours enjoying that and when I did a test fit agains the fuselage it fit perfectly !
I was very pleased with that.

Now I just need to to the mirror image shape for the other side, and then I can get the side panels on, at which point I can actually sit in it and start making airplane noises :)

Here's how it looks today
notice the high temp enamelled firewall.

This is the finished longeron, you can't really tell how complicated the shape is from the photo.

This is the opened up angle.
Notice that the top is flush all the way along the longeron, but the twist is on the side and only for the first 12 inches or so where it smooths out to 90 degrees, then starts the curve laterally to follow the fuselage shape.

Putting the fuselage together, 20 hours, 376 total

Cold, rainy, windy, all weekend, which is great news for aircraft construction
It means I get 2 days in the garage :)
And this is one of those parts of the project where a lot of things come together.
All the deburring, priming and preparation have been done, and assembly is rapid and rewarding.

I also finally decided on the interior paint scheme.
Not a lot of the paint will show in the final interior, because I intend to have the full carpet and sidewall set, but just in case I change my mind, I want to make sure all the visible surfaces are not just primer.
Additionally, I want a dark colour interior so that it won't relect as much in the large glass canopy, and should make the aircraft seem a lot more open.
Som nothing darker than black !, Matt black in fact, for all the interior surfaces, with red highlights on a few pieces because it looks cool.
I'll be doing the same colours for the carpet, seats and belts etc when I get them too.

So, during the week and lunchtimes when it was sunny, I did do a bit of painting, final coats, and clearcoat on the few potentially visible surfaces of the interior parts.
Which got pretty much everything ready for assembly this weekend.

I will have to go back and paint the baggage floor area later, because I had already assembled that before I decided to do this paint the interior idea.

Assembly went pretty well, albeit a little slow, not hard, but there's awkward rivets that need the wedge tool and some fiddling about to get in, especially in the narrow center channel.
but now I have quite a bit of the fuselage assembled, it really feels like it's coming along nicely.

I also installed the first part of the controls, the torque tube for the control sticks, so its not just ribs and panels, it now seems like it has airplane bits on it :)

more fueslage assembly 6 hours, 356 total

Today I drilled out the rivets on the nutplates that I incorrectly installed yesterday, wasn't too bad, I'm getting quite good at fixing my mistakes now :)

All the rivets came out nicely and didn't enlarge any of the holes, so putting in the new, correct nutplates was also an easy task.

After that I just did a few more steps from the plans, not much to show for it really, a few little bits more assembled.

I cut the hinges that attach the seats and machined all the countersink holes on the 2 forward bulkheads.

That pretty much completes all the machining work for this section and I should be able to assemble quite a lot of large bits very quickly in the next step :)

I was hoping to get that assembly done today, but I stopped for a roast beef dinner :) yum, not going back to work after that !

No photos today, but next time we should see most of the fuselage interior framework completed.

working on fuselage assembly, 8 hours, 350 total

I have a rotten cold and sore throat and feel crappy, and I needed to go do something to take my mind off it, so armed with a cup of hot tea I descended into the aircraft construction workshop (garage) and started the easy work of riveting all this lot together.

There's a lot of rivets, and you need to pay very close attention to the plans to get the right rivets in the right places, there are a lot of different rivet types on the same parts.

So it's slow going, just being careful and reading the plans over and over to really understand what to do, before doing it.

But it's pretty easy work, and very rewarding seeing aircraft shaped parts forming slowly on the bench.

I did mess up one set of nutplates on the baggage floor.

Vans ships a lot of the small parts like nutplates in bags all jumbled together, and a K1000-08 looks exactly like a K1000-3 unless you get them next to each other and really look closely !.

Needless to say, I was installing K1000-3's thinking they were K1000-08s, until I started a new section and saw the actual K1000-08s where in a separate bag !

oh well, easily fixed, I'll drill out the 40 rivets on the 20 incorrect nutplates tomorrow.

At least I forgot about my cold,  mostly.

photos of the progress:

wings assembled, fuselage started, about 150 hours, now somewhere around 342 hours total

It's been a long time since my last blog
I was busy with work most of last year, but did manage to work a few weekends.
So things have been happening, I just haven't been doing so well at updating this blog.

The wings were a long job of deburring, all those ribs, and they were pretty rough as delivered, took many weekends with a file, the scotch brite wheel and pretty much every deburring tool I have.
After that was done however, the wing assembly was very quick.
I built a wing rack to hold the wings. This helps during assembly, but is also very useful for storage of the wings while the rest of the aircraft is assembled.

The landing light is installed in the wing, as well as the stall warning vane, and the wiring for the position and strobe lights.
Vans has updated the kit with a new avionics package "skyview" and has also introduced some other modifications such as better wing electrical connectors, so, in anticipation of updating my kit, I have not assembled the old style connections, and I have left the wing top skins un-riveted for now so I can easily add these updates when they eventually get to me (in the final kit I expect).

I also have left the flaperons for now because the fuselage kit arrived and I got busy working on that :)
I'll go back and do the flaperons when I finish the wings with the new electrical connectors etc.

The fuselage kit is going well, and I took a slightly different approach this time.
I preassembled everything with clecos to see how it all went together, without removing the blue covering or really any of the assembly operations.
That really helps get a grip on the whole kit and when you go back and do the steps for real it all makes much more sense and goes much smoother.

So, just as I was in the middle of the first real assembly, I broke my hand squeezer !, well not broke as such, but the dimple die I was using got itself stuck in the pin and will not come out. this means I can't change dies.
not sure what I'm going to do about that, so for now I decided to do all the other steps first.

So, since I got so good at deburring during the wings, I went ahead and deburred pretty much every part for the fuselage kit in no time at all, (2 or 3 days)
what I have now is a big pile of deburred and primed and ready to assemble fuselage parts.

I think the actual assembly at this point will now be very quick.
This will get me up to the forming of the longerons (a big job with some skill required)
and then the finializing of the fuselage kit should also be pretty quick.

photos of the progress so far:

Wings skeletons complete. 12 hours - 192 hours total

After all the time spent in preparation with the wing ribs, it was really nice to finally see some progress.

The  priming of all the pieces went smoothly, I am getting much better at that bit.

And the assembly goes very quickly and easily with most of the rivets being the LP4-4 blind type.

Here are all the ribs straightened and painted ready for assembly

Assembly of the rear ribs was really easy

And I did both wings at the same time

That went so well, and so quick and easy that I just went right on and finished the front ribs also, for both wings.

Next step is to prep all the wing skins, which will take a little while since there are thousands of holes to deburr.

I also need to order some more primer.

Once that's done the rest of the assembly of the wings should go pretty quick.

I should really order the next kit now otherwise I'll have nothing to do !

Wings started. 63 hours - 180 hours total

I've been busy all summer at work, no weekends spare even, but I did get started on the wings.
Actually the first thing to do was tidy up the workshop and store all the Empennage and tailbone finished parts.

I found places on the walls to hang the control surfaces, and made a rack on the ceiling to get the tailbone out of the way.

I also built the wing worktable out of the tailbone crate and some scrap carpet.

The first steps for making the wings are to prepare some parts for the wing spars and hinges for the flaperons etc.
Here are all those parts layed out ready to deburr, match drill, final drill etc.

That was pretty easy, fairly standard stuff now that I've had some practice.
There were quite a few countersinks to make along the flanges of the spar doublers, and the flanges are at odd angles, so I made a jig to hold the pieces square in the drill press.

I scuffed up the parts ready to prime before assembly.
At this point I could have assembled some parts, but I wanted to get on with the dreaded wing ribs, so I left all the riveting for later.
Here are the parts primed and ready for assembly.

The wing ribs are the hardest part so far.
It's not that there's anything new or special to do, it's just that there's a LOT of it.
Deburr, Deburr, Deburr, Deburr.
Thousands of rivet holes to deburr, nearly all of them hard to reach on the inside of flanges.
Also the edges of the ribs are scalloped making it more work to deburr them too.
Plus each rib has 3 or more large "lightening" holes, which do as the name suggests, they make the part "lighter", while preserving strength, all of those have to be debarred also.
And to make matters worse, these are the nastiest cut pieces so far, with many tools marks and shape edges compared to the kit parts I have done before.
I suppose Vans must have used the nice new CNC machines for the other parts, and I can only guess, but perhaps some sort of old dull bladed chain saw to cut these parts ? :)

Here they are stacked and waiting...

So, anyway, with work getting in the way, its taken a quite a while to get these done.
Once they were deburred they needed to be straightened by fluting, which was actually pretty easy.
Next job is to clean them and scuff them up and finally prime them.
Then the fun begins and I can start assembly of the wing skeletons.