Joshua's RV-9A Project

Wing skeleton 5/8 deburred…got the outside edges of all ribs & spars, and inside edges of bottom left wing before the batteries ran out in the deburring driver.

Today’s task: prep leading edges for primer.  Disassembled both LE’s, deburred, scuffed rivet lines, and dimpled.  Drilled the splice strip for platenuts, and also finished deburring the landing light internal pieces; all the LE components are ready to be etched & primed.

In between deburring tasks, I also bolted & torqued the tiedown brackets to the spars.  Bellcrack brackets are hung loosely with their bolts, awaiting installation of the bellcranks.

Received the missing F-902-L this week, along with a replacement for the gouged up piece of bar stock.

Made it through the giant bag-o-hardware tonight.  Lots of bolts, nuts, and bags filled with 15 different kinds of washers all mixed up.  I will admit to pouring all the washers/nuts/etc back into the bag together again, after separating and counting them.  Oh well.  Eventually, I’ll get more hardware organizers, but the one I have now is brimming with wing kit parts already.

Email sent to Van’s about the F-902-R’s and the rough piece of bar stock.

Started work on the Duckworks light kits today, and got all the metal fabrication done, to the point of priming & assembly.  Cut and installed the template on the leading edge assembly (currently clecoed together off the wing), then roughed out the opening with a cutoff wheel in the Dremel.  Finished the opening with vixen file, mill files, Dremel sanding disc, and Scotchbrite wheel in the die grinder.  Cut, drilled and deburred the lamp bracket, drilled the holes in the ribs for the attachment screws/nutplates.  Lookin’ good.

Completed inventory of everything except the giant bag of hardware.  Everything present & accounted for except that I received two F-902-R’s, instead of one -R and one -L.  Also, one short piece of bar stock (AB4-125X1 1/2X8) is extremely rough looking and gouged up…some sort of manufacturing problem, I think.

Cleaned up the shop from unrelated projects, then opened up the fuselage box and started inventory.  Lots of fun parts; seatbacks, gear weldments, instrument panel…  and a giant mountain of packing paper!

With a syringe of fresh sealant in hand, I went through the left tank and encapsulated all the rivet heads, touching up any other spots that looked even slightly questionable.

Installed the snap bushings and ran vent line in both tanks, as well as installing the vent line fittings on the inboard end ribs.  Easy enough.  I did have to adjust the vent line clips at the fuel cap flange, making them slightly larger in diameter to accept the vent tube without binding.

Also attacked the tank access plates – deburred, attached nutplates for the fuel sender, installed the fuel line fitting, fuel pickup, anti-rotation bracket, and fuel sender, and prosealed over everything (as well as the vent line fittings in the tanks).  The fitting of the fuel line fitting and pickup was an iterative process, as I put the plate on the tanks repeatedly to ensure that the end of the pickup was positioned as near the bottom of the tank as possible, yet reliably not rubbing on the tank skin.  The plans designate drilling the rivet holes for the anti-rotation brackets to #30, which allowed me to fix the misalignment of the holes I would otherwise have had, as the fuel fitting didn’t end up directly centered between those two rivet holes, in order to put the pickup where I wanted it.

I also used AD1097AD4-5 rivets (flush “oops” rivets) on the anti-rotation bracket, rather than the specified AD470AD4-5′s (universal head), as there was simply no way any of my rivet sets would get in there with the fuel pickup installed (the nut gets in the way), and you can’t install the bracket before you install the nut, as its whole point is to keep the nut in place.  So I used the oops rivets (this isn’t a structural point), and back-riveted them.  Even then, the angle wasn’t perfect, so a couple of the rivets aren’t perfect, but I don’t see it being a big deal.

Nearly ready to put the baffles on these tanks…need to find a flaring tool to make the vent line flares, and have a second pair of eyes take a look inside first.

Finished up the riveting of the fuel tank ribs with the bottom of the right tank.  Went well; only had to drill out 2 rivets.  Started installing the tank attach brackets at the inboard ends, which use long (-8) AD4 rivets.  My straight 1/8″ universal-head rivet set is short, so there were two rivets on each bracket where the gun couldn’t get into position because the head hit the bracket.  I tried using the double-offset set, and had no luck at all.  Drilled out the same rivet twice, and another once, before giving up on those for now.  Because they’re so deep into the tank, it’s hard to manage keeping the longer double-offset set straight, and the bucking bar straight, at the same time.  It really requires two hands on the gun side…which leaves no hands for bucking.  I do also have a single-offset set, which is definitely a two-hander.  I’ve run into a bit of a human resource problem here, I think–and I fear the same problem will occur when it’s time to rivet skins on the wing.  The easy solution here would be to get a longer straight-shank set to clear the bracket.  Not sure what I’ll do about wing skin riveting.

Filled a 20cc syringe with a fresh batch of Proseal (mixing weight of 35 grams yielded about 15cc of usable Proseal…it’s impossible to scrape it all off the waxed paper!) and encapsulated the shop heads of the right tank rivets.  I have about 5cc leftover, so that went into the freezer.  The syringe method will be handy for the small sealing jobs, I think–fittings, access panels, etc.  Hopefully I can do the shop heads on the other tank tomorrow after work, and then try to get a Tech Counselor out to put another eyeball on the tanks (and other wing stuff I have done) before putting the baffles on.

Riveted the top side of the right tank, wet-installing the rivets.  Slow process, but fewer bad rivets than last time; cleaning the bucking bar after every rivet instead of every other rivet seemed to help.  I riveted the tank standing on its end, then laid a sock in the rib being riveted.  The bucking bar rests on the sock and lines up well with the rivet tail; this made it easier to keep the bar aligned with the rivet when doing the necessary blind bucking on the forward part of the curved tank surface.