Month: February 2014

Van’s offers two practice kits to exercise to help form the skills you need to build an airplane on something other than the airplane you want to build. One is a toolbox, the other is a small section of an aileron.

We started on the toolbox, first. Here’s a picture of the first pieces clekoed together:

Shortly thereafter, we realized that we really needed our hand squeezer to dimple the flanges. We do have the DRDT-2, but our hand squeezer is backordered, and there’s no way to get the flangers into the DRDT2-2.  Frustrating.  We also discovered that the deburring tool we have doesn’t work on small drill holes, and the other deburring tool is also backordered.

So we started on the airfoil.  We were able to get reasonably far on it, before we realized we had the same problem.

 

Still, that was an entire day’s worth of work.  And we haven’t even started on the airplane!

I spent the entire day working on the shop and the workbenches.  It’s not very glorious work, and I don’t even have pictures.  I finished the workbenches, and spent hours cleaning and organizing the shop.  I put the label maker to use and labeled the tool chest.  I set up the rivet gun and air drill, and tested them.  They make impressive noises.  I spent a lot of time setting up the DRDT-2, and creating a removable perch for it between the two work benches.  While dimpling, it will fit between the two benches, and when we’re done dimpling, it can be removed and placed on one of the shelves below the benches, and the benches shoved together.

Tomorrow we start on the practice projects!  I’m hoping we can finish them, but our hand squeezer has been backordered.  I’m not sure if we need to squeeze any rivets.  If not, we should be good to go.