Progress has been slow during the last week or so. Too much work stuff getting in the way of building, and we’re struggling to get the Archer’s annual completed. Unfortunately, we’ve decided that it’s time to sell the Archer – we just can’t afford to keep it and finish the RV. Plus, we’re starting to consider buying a house and we need to put aside money for a down payment. But selling the Archer will hurt…it seems like we’re losing a member of the family.

I ordered a new left elevator root rib from Van’s. Their advice on the previous part (see my 12 March post) was just to reshape the flange with a hand seamer. A new part was easier to work with. I reassembled the elevator with the new part, then match-drilled the whole structure.

I spent a few minutes inserting rod end bearings into the spar, then declared success. Only one more component to go!

Losing not a second (ok, maybe losing a lot of seconds) I clecoed the left elevator together – and promptly found a problem with the left elevator’s root rib. Almost looks like the rib’s forward flange was bent in the wrong place, because when it’s clecoed to the spar none of the other holes line up – and they’re way off – like more than one hole diameter off. The part just doesn’t look right. I fired off an email and some pictures to Van’s to get their opinion. With work on the left elevator itself stalled, I pulled out the vixen file and shaped the left counterweight to its final form.

Fun with edge-rolling

I took the day off from work…a mental health day was required. So I spent half the day futzing with the right elevator, trying some new techniques to close its leading edge skins. For some reason, this process seemed a lot harder than it did for the rudder – maybe it’s because the skins are thicker, 0.020″ versus 0.016″ for the rudder.

Lots ‘o duct tape

The trick, I found for me at least, was to tape the livin’ crap out of the skin edge and dowel. That way the dowel pulls evenly on the skin as torque is applied to it. I also found that rolling the inside edge very slightly more than 90 degrees, helps make a nice smooth seam – especially if you use one of those spiffy Cleaveland edge-rolling tools on the outside skin. Adjust the bend with some manual pressure and you’re all set. One other thing that occurred to me after that I did this is to use a larger dowel for the skin sections closer to the root – they have larger radii for the leading edge.

Mmmmm…rolls

Here’s what the almost-finished product looked like. All that was left for today was to close out the edge with pop rivets.

Again, no pictures to document recent work. Over the last three days I riveted the right elevator frame to its skin. I tried some techniques to buck solid rivets in those hard-to-reach trailing edges. I polished the business end of a chisel and used it and a hammer as a sort-of back rivet set, along with the back-riveting plate, to set these rivets. No luck. So, I wound up using the pneumatic squeezer with my pseudo-reliable 4″ no-hole yoke, and managed to bend the rib flanges enough to get the yoke nose in and squeeze the rivets.

The right elevator horn riveted

The right elevator frame is finished, and here’s the only picture I took. (April 9, 2005 – Note from the future…when riveting the end ribs to the elevator spar, first rivet the two AN426 rivets that go forward and aft through the spar web and rib tab. Then finish the rivets that go laterally through the spar tab and rib web. That way you’ll have a little extra flexibility to get a squeezer into the spar web areas; the spar tab-to-rib web rivets make this a more difficult task)

Dave and Dave bending the left elevator skin

One of the nice things about RV building has been meeting other builders like Dave Rogers – he’s been helping my friend John Sannizzaro with his project. Dave is building a beautiful RV-8, and he kindly volunteered to show me the best way to bend elevator skins to the correct radius. Here we are using Dave’s bending brake to radius the left elevator skin.

Left elevator in brake

With the brake cranked down a bit, the left elevator has a nice trailing edge radius.

Get bent!

We followed the same process on the right elevator skin. Looks good! Dave bought CreativAir’s combination wingtip LED light/halogen landing light kit for his project. I hadn’t seen LED position lights before, so Dave hooked his up. Pretty freakin’ cool – I want a pair!

LED lights

Here’s the other side. You can see the circular cutout for a 75-watt halogen bulb.

More LED lights

Dave hooked the halogen landing light up; it puts out a lot of light. I’ll look forward to seeing how this installation works out.

Landing

Still more work with little visual progress. This time it was prepping, alodining and priming the left elevator parts. Once again, Captain John kindly let me use his paint booth. I didn’t take any pictures, but if I did, they would look remarkably like this.

Yes, it’s the same picture as above

I didn’t mention it before, but the little spray gun I’m using is a $39.95 el cheapo Harbor Freight HVLP unit. Well, it works great – no need to spend a lot of money on a gun to shoot primer. The resulting parts came out ok.

More carcinogenic primer

Heavy-handed camera work

As my friend Jim says, there hasn’t been much visual progress lately. All I’ve had time to do is finish filing the right counterweight… and here it is. This is so exciting I can’t stand it.

More fun with back-riveting…this time on the right elevator. I learned from the Sportair class that in order to avoid unsightly bends in thin control surfaces when back-riveting, you gotta have an extra pair of hands to open up the skins and at the same time keep the bottom skin flat against the work surface. So Ellen was once again co-opted to work on the plane. We also found out that small 2″x4″ blocks came in handy to press down and back along the skin bend.

Here’s the right side…

A stiff skin

…and the left.

The other stiff skin

Priming time again…ugh. I hate priming. But fortunately my friend and fellow RV-7 builder John was kind enough to lend me the use of his painting booth. So it was time to prepare the skins, stiffeners, and right elevator frame for priming. Everything but the skins was scuffed and alodined using the Touch-n-Prep pen. The skins were just scuffed.

Priming at Cap’n John’s place

Gotta have that mask on…

Cap’n John

Meanwhile, John relaxed and worked on the tiedown spacers for his wings.