Finished the wing...sort of

We closed up the right wing and put it on our wing rack along with the left wing. Now, we're starting on the flaperon in section 18. George was busy making the Actuation bracket from the stock material that was provided for us. George has kind of a machinist background in that he used to work for Lockheed and is familiar with the the drawings and dimensions. While George was busy with that, I was busy not reading the directions completely, again, and assembled the outboard nose ribs to the counterbalance. Yup, I did a really great job...until George pointed out that there was no mention of actually RIVETING the parts together. So, I drilled out just about all the rivets so we could install the pivot brackets and the A-1205 ribs. The photos are of George, pretending to measure for creation of some parts; of me drilling holes for the flaperon, the end of the counterbalance tube secured to the brace, and the hole that had to be drilled in the counterbalance tube.

Skin placement on right wing.

Today,George, and I spent about 6 hours skinning the right wing. Everything was pretty uneventful; we just had to remember which side of the wing was up and which rivets to use in what holes. We seemed to have more problems stripping the !@#$%^ blue plastic protective coating off the wings. Using the soldering iron is pretty efficient, but I'm less patient than my partner and I tend to "hurry" when I'm stripping the stuff.

We didn't take my pics today.

Beginning the Right Wing for the RV12

Since we got the left wing together, and everything looks like a wing, we're on the right side. Everything went rather smoothly, until both George and I both, had a difficult time determining which way was us, so we call Van's and talked to Ken, and he very calmly assured us that we would be able to figure out our problem. ( We were trying to put the hinge assembly on while the wing was lying on our workbench, upside down...and of course it wouldn't fit in that position.)

Anyway, we put on the outboard, inboard, and middle skins, and got most of the riveting completed before we called it a day.

Wing Stand for the RV12

Well, we finished the Left wing so now we need a place to keep it, so we checked a couple of places and George had some plans that he liked, so we built his plans. It's kinda like an inverted "T" with a couple of slings made of old carpet. It's a really sturdy stand and well constructed and only cost us about 20 bucks. the stand is about 7 or 8 feet long and about 40 inches wide. It CAN be made more narrow and longer, if you like. It took the two of us about 4 hours to built, and we took our time.

Here's the pic's.

Left wing closed

Today, we got everything together, all the holes filled with rivets or some other appropriate object, and the wing flipped back with the top of the wing facing up. We had a couple of pop rivets that didn't want to cooperate so we sent them to rivet Heaven and replaced them with rivets that would cooperate. We did notice some strange noises in the wing though, when we flipped it over. (...anybody know how to remove rivet nails from a sealed wing???)

We made the handy little tool for bending and we got all the angles pretty close, and that was pretty important in the assembly process in order to make everything fit.

I think we're going to go ahead and make some kind of cradle for the wing before we finish up the right wing, possibly using the suggested vehicle previously posted by Jerry.

We have a little concern about what shows on the underside of the wing, on the outboard side. You can see the factory spacers on the end piece; I just wonder if they knew that was going to be exposed.

RV12 Installing Wing Skins

We called Van's this am to tell them about our inability to install the center wing panel, and they told us to keep trying, which we did, and we eventually got it in. HOWEVER, I think if they had told us to not rivet the first two or three rivets closest to the center panel, on each inboard and outboard section, it would have made the installation much easier.

We had to drill out a couple of rivets again today, simply because there as too much head protruding.

We're just about ready to close the wing; the only remaining items left are the inspection plate on the underside and the panel on the outboard edge of the wing that has a number of tabs that are to be bent to varying degrees...that should be interesting.

I'm including photos of our "problem-child" center wing panel. Note the "J" curve in the skin of the center skin that needs to fit in the groove of the front nose ribs. If I were building this plane again, I'd probably sit down and figure out which panels would be exposed, and I'd 'etch' the blue film with the soldering gun, and pull the strips off that would expose the holes to be riveted. As it stands now, we have to stop and spend 5 or 10 minutes etching and stripping the wings.

Closing the left wing process

We started about 10:00 this morning and George and I both agreed it was uncomfortable working. So, I thought if I bought a small airconditioner, it might help cool the garage...

Anyway, after we bought the AC and installed it, we realized that it was a waste, so we opened the doors back up and sweated in the 90 degree heat.

Back to the plane, we had the top skins on, on Tuesday, but today, we put on the bottom skins. We had a couple of 'difficult' rivets but George continues to hone his rivet-taking-out skills. Then, we forgot to take off the plastic coating on one of the skins that we had intstalled. Fortunately, we just had them cleco'd, and it was only a couple of minutes to take them off.

One of the photos, today, is of George using an old soldering iron to remove the blue film from the aluminum. It's really a slick way of just removing the tape around the area you are working. We also some problems with the hinge bracket assemblies on page 17-03. One of our rivets didn't grab the sheetmetal, we had to drill that one out also.

We quit around 7:30 feeling as though we had another enjoyable and productive day. This is a really great kit to build. The instructions are really GREAT!.

Installing the skins

Today is June 3rd and we are on page 17-02 We got the stall warning indicator functioning; we had to bend the main tab of the unit in order to get it functioning while positioned in it's slot. We laid the main skins on the inboard, outboard, and middle sections. To begin, we used a soldering iron to reveal the holes that we'd be using for the rivets. You simply heat up the tip and drag it slowly over the areas that you want revealed and pull away just the area that you'll be working on; that way, the rest of the 'skin' will be protected. We also needed to lap the inboard skin section edges to in order to make them fit correctly; read the section that they direct you to so that you can understand the process. My partner came up with an idea on how to do it without buying the special tool; we laid the skin on a solid surface, allowing about 1/4 inch to overhang the edge of the table, and then we took a block of 2x4 and held it at a slight angle, and bent the edge slightly by running the wood along the edge. Incidently, up to this point we haven't used 350 Clecos at any one point in time; it might be important when we do the fusilage though. Our rivet gun failed us and we had to figure out how to fix it since the factory couldn't figure out the solution to he problem. We also weren't paying attention to the directions as we put some rivets where they weren't supposed to go, but we drilled them out and continued on. The two of us worked about 8 hours today, one of our longer days. I've got some before and after photos, along with one showing how we lapped the edges of the middle skin.