July 4 - Canopy Frame problems

We had to use the change that came down on the canopy frame, and put the extra washer inbetween the frame and the fuselage. We also used some widenose pliars and bent the instrument panel cover down to facilitate the opening and closing of the canopy frame.
The strap that we put on the rear glass seemed to really help conform the glass to the rollbar, and that was really an easy overnite fix.
We put on the canopy attach angles, fluting them slightly to conform to the shape of the longeron, and then proceeded to use a 40 drill bit to make the holes. We then pulled them off and primered them. I'll spray them with the spatter paint later.
After we matchdrilled the rear glass, we pulled the cleco's and took off the turtle skins along with the glass. We're going to leave them off until Van's reaches resolution on the gastank, then we'll put the tank in with the luggage compartment exposed.
We used a 40 drill bit to match drill, but when we get ready to tap the holes, we'll use a 36 bit since my engineer-partner said that bit is more compatible use a 6/32 tap. If you use the 40 bit, the 6/32 tap won't fit very easily.
The photos today are of the clecos sticking out of the rear glass, and of George in the process of tapping the holes...and breaking the tap in the process...

July 2 and 3 progress report.

On July 2nd, we finally got the fiberglass tailcone installed on the rear, but we discovered that a portion of the stabilator was scraping the fiberglass cone so we had to loosen the screws on the cone and enlarge the holes in order to get the cone to fit properly. We also took off the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer in order to flatten one of the edges...which we had bent a little. We also put in some of the floor paneling in the luggage compartment.
JULY 3RD, we pulled the plane out today to make the final fitting of the wings. We discovered that you need to be VERY careful when installing and removing the wings, or stand a chance of denting-or-worse the side skin of the a/c. We got everything on ok but the flaperon on the right was binding on some parts so we took out the
wing to figure what we were going to do. We used the file and took off some of the offending metal. We then loaded the wings on a traier and then headed up to Cartersville to put the wings in our hangar. When we got back, we took out the rear glass that we had sitting in the sun, and draped it over the rear of the turtle deck.
We tried to install it, but instead we put it in position and tried to get things lined up but the plastic was still a little brittle so we sashed it up with a small turnbuckle type strap. We'll finish it up tomorrow.

RV 12 Build January 24

JANUARY 23, we started back on pg 11=03, and today was a need for very small fingers. We had to get the proper number of washers in the stabilator attach. We used masking tape to hold washers in place while we ran bolts where they were supposed to go. Page 11-04, we installed the AST assembly. We had a bit of a hard time fitting the AST onto the hinge and running the hinge pin. We did all of the items on the 22nd, while someone else was doing another part of the assembly process. Page 11-06 was doing a lot of small parts assembly. Note that the K1000-8 called out in figure 1, is a UNIQUE nutplate and can be found in the bag with the other servo parts.
JANUARY 24, we finished wiring the servo mechanism, on page 11-06. We worked on page 12=02, and used a belt sander to get the right measurements on the fairings. Went pretty quickly using the sander.

RV 12 Building Beginning January 21

Well, I'm doing little better; only two days since I entered our progress.
JANUARY 21, we picked up on page 10-06 and put on the bottom skin. I only pulled 3 bad rivets; it was easier with two people to hook the skins into the 'J' channel. We went on to page 10-07 and 10-08. I think I may be repeating myself because this is where we installed the static port. We went on to page 10-09 and didn't have any problems. We ran an extra string in case we have the ability to put in a strobe.Page 10-10 was ok; we filed a little off F-1210C, alittle too much as it turned out. We didn't have anything to rivet the outside skin to on the outside edge of the flange pictured in Figure 2. We had to break the edges of F1278, using a 2x4x8 on the floor and running a wood block on the edge of the skin. It worked pretty well, as we used this same method before and we attained a satisfactory seal.
JANUARY 22, page 11-02, we mounted the V-stab assembly and had a tought time putting on the bolts on the lower hinge assembly. We used masking tape to hold the washers in place while we threaded the bolts through their appropriate holes. We found that we had to use a file to plane down the surface of the rudder assembly, as it nearly comes in contact with the V-Stab assembly when swung to either side. It would DEFINITELY contact the mating surface, if you paint your plane. It took a long time to file down the surface; I'm still not sure we took off enough.We're going to pick up with page 11-03 tomorrow.

Resuming on January 8th building

You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little out of sequence; I think my last entry was for January 8th, so I'll start on January 9th. This was page 08-03, and the only problems we had on this page was locating the HS-1223 Drill Guide, which we eventually found.
JANUARY 10, we started on page 8-04, the horizontal stabilizer. Just make sure you've got the right side up. Be carejul on page 9-02 and lay out your spars in the right orientation, and count your rivet hose carefully, and use the correct rivets. We had to open up some of the holes with a #40 bit before we could countersink them. Page 9-03, another page requiring reading and re-reading. It helped me to use a yellow highlighter at the beginning of each direction. (had my LD students do that a lot in high school.)
JANUARY 14, We started on page 9-04. While one guy was layng up the work, another person did the counter-sinking. Be careful on this page in regards to your hole selection for the nutplates. Page 9-05 required a lot of clecoing, drilling, unclecoing, deburring and refastening. I notice that we did page 9-06 on January 13.In figure 3, I fluted some of the ribs, especially the longer ones. Back to January 14, on page 9-07, count your eyelets carefully and pay attention to the un-notched edges on the drill guide. I drilled one too many holes when I drilled right through a piece of masking tape that was supposed to mark the hole I wasn't supposed to drill... Page 9-08, we went through step 3 and quit for the day.
JANUARY 15 we picked up on step 4 on page 9-08. Make sure you leave the bottom row of rivets open on step 5. Page 9-09 went pretty quick, just had to remember to remove some parts to deburr.
JANUARY 16 we started on page 9-10; note that the lead weights are tapered and flat on one side, so they can be put together, face-to-face. Note that the counterbalance are final assembly will be completed during section 11. Most of the work on page 10-02 was stripping the plastic and cleaning up the edges. We went to Harbor Freight and bought a bunch of those rectangular sanding sponges and used them; they really worked well. Step 3 called out for fluting the edges, but it was really tough to do, so we didn't think we needed to do it. We completed page 10-02.
JANUARY 17, we started page 10-03, and if there was ever a page that needed a hydralic squeezer, this was it. My thumb is still store from using the hand squeezer on this page. We did each type of rivet (like all the AN426AD3-4's) at one time, and marked their location on the F1211 assembly. DON'T rivet the F1211C-R@L onto the assembly!
JANUARY 21, page 10-05, we started assembly of the stabilator. We used the superglue on the washers, after we put a light coat of oil on the bolt, in case some glue got on the bolt. We pulled off our plywood table top and suspended the F1282 L&R between our two sawhorses and started laying up the tailcone (YEA!). Make sure you've got smoothe edges, otherwise they'll show up when you're all assembled. It took 2 people to align the notches with the skins, because we're both pretty clumsy when it comes to that stuff. Make sure you've got the flanges on the 1208 frames going in the correct direction. Page 10-07, A LOT OF RIVETING!!. page 10-08, we did the wiring and tying up of plastic tubing. We couldn't get the pin out of the static port, so we used a Dremel to saw off the end, then it came out easily.

RV 12 building, beginning 12/19

Well, I'm only a month behind this time; let's see if I can make sense of this. My last post was on 12/18 and we were hindered by awaiting 'care packages' from Vans, and the holidays, we skipped around a good bit. I hope you'll excuse some of the gaps, or seemingly, out of place steps.
I'm going to start with page 28-03, bending of the fuel lines. I wasn't happy with my work on the fuel line, so I bought another 24 inches and rebent the big line you see on pg 28-03, or more accurately, GEORGE rebent it and did a beautiful job. ( I have a hard time drawing a straight line, let alone bending pipe.)
On 28-05, we did steps 3-5 on 12/20. The big thing here is remembering to put the nut on BEFORE yu do he flaring. On Pg 28-06, we completed steps 1 and 2 but left the rest of the page as George thought it would be easier to wait until we got the fuel tank in to make the match-up. We DID do step 9 as it didn't need the fuel tank for an exact matchup. We completed pg 29-02 over to step 3; we also tried to dimple everything we could ST THE SAME TIME from this page; it seemed to make it easier.
December 23 we did steps 5 through 9.
On December 24, we did pg 20-03, steps 1-4 but MAYBE we should have done seps 2,3,and 4 before we did step 1...would've made it easier. One of the advantages of having two people working on a project like this, is that while one person is doing a "one person" job, the other one can be setting up parts for the next step or separating and deburring or drilling parts, which is what was going on here. There were a number of pieces that needed to be separated, so those were the steps that were ususally done out of sequence. We continued over to pg 29-04 doing steps 1 through 4.
We quit for Christmas and started back up on the 26th with step 5. We stopped with step 12 as we're going to try to do most of our sealing on the same day. If you'll look at the bottom of fire 4 on the left side where it says to use 'AN426AD4-5, 14 places", we thought maybe we should be using 4.6's instead.
December 12/27, we did pg 29-05, skipping steps 2 and 3 for later (a big mistake, as we had to rivet from inside the firewall instead of from the engine compartment side.) George thought the space for the battery was too small, so we waited to confirm.
On 12/30, we (George) built the glove box kit...without reading the instructions. WE had to do some modifications and remove some of the rivets and move the door over to cover the gap that resulted. that was one of the FEW mistakes that George made...as he reminds me, as opposed to the INNUMERABLE mistakes that I've made...
WE finished up the map box on January 3rd.
We finished up with step 1 on pg 29-07 and left the instrument panel resting peacefully on top of the cowling for later assembly. We continued on with pg 24-05 finishing up steps 3,4 and 5 and commpleting steps 1-4 on pg 24-06.
January 7 we did pg 06-02 and the next pages went quickly. Most of one persons time was spent on finishing the edges of the metal and separating and deburring parts of the stabilizer.Pages 06-03 and 04 were uneventful and we completed steps 1 and 2 on pg 06-05.
January 8th we started on step 3 and finished the rest of 06-05 and 06. IT'S TIME TO BUY A PNEUMATIC SQUEEZER!!. My thumbs are about to give out from all the squeezing. We completed steps 1 though 6 on pg 06-07. Make sure you have the ribs facing in the direction indicated otherwise the flange rivet holes won't align.
We're going to start up again tomorrow...more to follow.

Fuselage progress from around 10/31...

I'm about a month behind in my posts but I'll attempt to make some kind of sense of our progress. We finally received the new part from Vans for the floorboard and got it installed; in the meantime, we skipped around a bit trying to do what we could so we didn't have much down time. I'll report on a page-by-page basis and the dates that we completed various steps. Please excuse the confusion, and excuse any repitition that I may be making.
On pg 21-14, we did step 1 on 11/2 and steps 2 through 7 and page 21-15 steps 2 through 4. We did separation of parts whenever we could, as in step 1, 8, and 9 at an earlier date. We found that doing as much dimpling as we could while we had a particular die in the squeezer, saved us a bit of time. On pg 21-16, I did a lot of the dimpling BEFORE we installed the the skins on the bottom.
On 11/6, we completed pages 21-18 and 19. On 11/8, we completed step 3 though 11. The bushings were a snap...
On 11/12, we did pg 21-20 and pg 22-02 though step 12. On 11/13 we did pg 22-03. I notice that we pg 22-04 on 11/12.
I have written that we did pg 22-05 on 11/28 which is clecoing and riveting the lower fuse assembly to the mid fuse and botom skin assembly.
The next part was really tricky; George had a friend at his local EAA chapter that had some equipment that helped him with the bendng of the longeron. We tried bending with a hammer but that was a joke. Anyway, on pg 23-02, it gives very exact directions on how to bend and to what specifications they were to be bent. TRUST ME! If you don't get it right, your plane will be weird looking. We got this stuff all done on 11/28.
We did pg 23-03 step 1 and 2 on 11/13 and step 3 and 4 and step 2 on pg 23-04 on 11/15. We did steps 3 though 8 on 11/21.
We did step 8 on pg 23-04 and stept 1 and 2 on pg 23-05 on 11/29. I used a Dremel to cut out the skin.
On 12/10 we did pg 23-06 stepts 1-8, except for the cut out parts, and we did those earlier. We ran out of LP 4-5's at this point and had to request some more. Alot of this date was spent on assembling and drilling and disassembling and deburring parts.
On 12/12, we did pg 24-02, the roll bar assembly. That took us our whole work day. We discussed priming it then, but in our finite wisdom, decided not to. (I ended up priming it later, AFTER it was installed...a truly stupid thng.) Whenever you see a step that has something to do with 'remove hatched area and separate', just figure that was done inbetween jobs or when one of us was doing another step where only one set of hands was required.
Page 23-07 and and 08 was done on 11/4, 12/18, and 12/4, as they were all sub-assemblies and didn't have to be done immediately at that point of assembly.
We did pg 26-02 on 12/2 and 12/3, also pg 26-03, and 04.
We completed pgs 27-01 through 03 on 12/3 and 12/4. We started the plumbing on pg 27-04 on 12/5. Pg 27-05 was completed on 12/14. Running the pipe through the fuselage was a bear.
We did 27-06 and 28-01 though 28-04 on 12/18.
I'll try to post some more tomorrow.