Vertical Stab
26 August
Step one: 8 hours
We started with the actual piece of the vertical tail assembly this afternoon. Of course the first piece is cutting a doubler (rear spar caps) for the tail to hold the three hinges for the rudder. Its not a hard cut but one that requires some thought and since it’s the first one there is a little stress. The first mistake was the band saw blade. It was not right size so a pneumatic wheel cutter was used and everything came out just fine. Several matched drilled holes have been drilled in the main vertical piece which holds the two doubles via clamps until we finish the deburring, priming, and getting the other pieces together for the final riveting and assembly.
This was a big day. Teresa actually left the hangar during the cuts because as most of us know that have done this the first step does provide some stress if you have never built anything more than a balsa wood glider.
1 September
Step two: 8 hours
Cuts for the rear spar assembly are complete. Most of the pieces have now been deburred, Zinc-Chromate primed (at least where metal to metal contact is going to be made), counter sunk where called for, and reassembled with Clecos for the rivet prep work.
Priming was done based whether or not we had metal to metal contact (in other words: have we layered pieces together where priming could not happen once the section is assembled) to leave the option for full internal part priming later. We are not sure this is necessary but we will do the research and come up with a decision before we close up section 6. Basically we are through page 6-2 of the vertical stabilizer.
2 September
Finishing the vertical stabilizer: Page 6-3, 6-4, and 6-5…18 hours
As we were advised from several builders and a few of the factory reps at Oshkosh we decided to zinc chromate the metal to metal areas as mentioned earlier. Jury is still out as to covering everything with the primer or not.
After several iterations of wrapping the sheet metal around the skeleton and removing it we finally started squeezing rivets into the skeleton.
Tomorrow we hope to finish the entire assembly of the vertical stabilizer. Notice the skin in the background…primed only where the skeleton will fit.
3 September
Finishing the vertical stabilizer: 8 hours
Most of the skin wrapping went well for us today however we did decide to go our own route with regard to some of the steps to seal the skin to the VS skeleton frameworks.
Rather than rivet the forward nose ribs to the skin we choose to cleco and retain the right to pull the end cap rather than peel back the skin from the rear as the plan calls for. This allowed very easy access to the inside rivets and maintained the alignment of the final drilled holes.
Final vertical stabilizer assembly complete.
Total time on this section - 34 hours
Documentation
|
