Author: Berck

Spent the entire day on the airplane.  Randy’s sadly out of town this weekend, so it was mostly me and then Joanna showed up to help at a very appropriate time.

Most of the morning was spent deburring.  Then I was able to assemble the entire vertical stabilizer skeleton and match drill the holes…

Then the exciting part!  Several hours of work for one sentence of instructions: “Cleco the skin to the skeleton.”  Got that done, match drilled the holes in the skin, and pulled it all apart.  Deburred and dimpled the skins and the skeleton.

Jonah managed to give herself a blister cleco’ing, and I think she’s gotten pretty good at hole deburring.

I’ve got some countersinking to do, still, then I can cleco the thing back together.  I’ll probably wait for Randy before I start pounding rivets, but this is exciting looking progress.

It’s easy to start thinking you can have a whole plane assembled in no time when you start seeing things that look like airplane parts on the workbench.  But from looking at other’s build logs, we’ve got a very, very, very long road ahead of is.  Fortunately, I’m enjoying it.

Berck: 10 hours, Jonah: 5 hours.

First day after work this week actually making forward progress on the plane.   Other days were involved in indirect things like hanging more lights in the garage.

Most of the progress was disassembling, deburring, reassembling.  Ready for some more holes to be drilled.  The white, powder-coated bits are the hinge brackets for the rudder.  The VS-1008 doubler that I spent 2 hours deburring is on the front of the spar (underside in this picture), so you can’t even see it.

I spent a fair amount of time looking for the hinge brackets.  They were in with the little parts that Jonah put in bins.  I hadn’t realized that there were parts like that in the bins, so I searched the shelves far and wide, first.  I also have come to the conclusion that (as I suspected) we have arranged the parts on the shelf in a most ridiculous way: by subkit.  The subkits were just for their packing purposes and are useless for actual parts sorting.  I might take them all down this weekend and re-arrange by component.

 

Berck: 3 hours.