Vertical Stabilizer

Read the plans, read the plans, read the plans.  Measure twice, cut (drill/rivet) once.  Building this airplane "quickly" isn't a good idea, at least not as my first build.  Looking ahead in the plans, the VS isn't necessarily challenging, instead it provided many opportunities for me to get used to my tools and figure out how to set up my shop/work bench area.  As much as possible, I left all my tools out on the bench and quickly realized what I was reaching for most often.  Once I had a vision of what I would need in the future, I put things away or hung them on the pegboard according to that hierarchy.  We'll see how that plays out in the future, I'm sure changes will be required.

As you can see, the aluminum marks up pretty easily.  I lurked in the forums and talked to the SportAir workshop instructor and I'm not overly concerned about it unless the scratches are pretty deep, which could lead to stress fractures later on.  Most of these could be buffed out with the red 3M pads, but I'm not planning on doing that yet.

The hair should have stood up on the back of my neck when my son asked "Dad, where's the deburring bit for the drill?"  Sigh...by the time I got out to the garage to see his progress, it was too late.  Some of the holes were clearly over-deburred.  I talked to the SportAir instructor about this as well and he said that as long as the 3-3.5 rivet still fits without "play" then it should be fine.  Final pictures with rivets in these holes below (everything turned out fine, but a good lesson learned).  Don't go crazy, you should only see a very small shiny ring around the edge of the whole where you debur the aluminum.

 More pictures of the rear spar with the doubler and rudder hinges attached.  Pay careful attention to which side take the flush rivet heads at the bottom.

Here's the VS mock up, ready for match and final drilling.  

I'm still working on getting the pictures to show up correctly in the blog.  It's a work in progress.  

A couple of build notes for the final assembly and riveting.  Once the ribs were riveted to the front spar, I reattached the skin to the skeleton assembly.  I had to be very careful not to bend any pieces and parts, specifically the tip of the VS-706 flange as the skin went on.  Get an extra set of hands if necessary.

The rivets inside the VS will need to be bucked and it was challenging to place the bucking bar in the correct position while holding the rivet gun flush on the outside of the skin.  I got better after a few attempts, but there were a few cases where the bucking bar was pressed up against the front spar, leaving a few marks in the corners.  I ended up using my thumb as a cushion up against the spar to minimize bar/spar contact during riveting.

Once the rear spar went on, things seemed to be going okay until I needed to rivet close aboard to the rudder hinges and near the heads of the 4-4 rivets along the doubler.  The ones near the rivet heads were doable, but barely.  I did end up messing a few of those up, which had to be drilled out.  Around the rudder hinges, there wasn't enough clearance for the tool, so I had to go back to the bucking bar.  I ran into the same problem as inside the structure, with the bucking bar rubbing against the hinges in a few places.  As always, go slow...the last few pictures above show the final result, which I'm pretty happy with.  It's not perfect, but I'm building on!