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September 30, 2004:
(1 hr.) I wanted to etch, alodine, and prime the HS skeleton
today, but the weather would not cooperate. It was raining, and
since I want to apply these chemicals while outdoors, I will have to
wait for another day. Instead, I spent a short period of time to
dimple all the holes in the skin.
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October 1, 2004: (3
hrs.) It was still raining outside today, so I decided to do
the prep and paint work in the shop.
First I brushed Alumiprep on each part and scrubbed them with a Scotchbrite pad. I then rinsed them in water and hung them to dry on my wing jig from some finish nails.
Next, I put the parts in an Alodine bath for 3 minutes, rinsed them in water and hung them to dry again.
The Alodine bath works great. Here you can see some HS Ribs soaking in the Alodine in a large Tupperware container. For the spars I just brushed the Alodine on and it did not take nearly as well as when soaking.
After all the parts dried, I mixed up the AZKO epoxy paint (1:1) and gave everything a nice coat of paint. It went on pretty translucent. I believe that is the way you want it. This was my first time spraying with a small HVLP touch-up gun. Hopefully next time I will do better. There were a few parts that did not coat too evenly because I sprayed to much in one shot. Oh well, no harm don.
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October 2, 2004: (3 hrs) Today was my first day of riveting. I used the Avery Squeezer to rivet the entire rear rear HS spar. It took a bit of maneuvering to get the squeezer in place over the rivets in the spar, but the results were worth it. Once I completed the rear HS, I moved onto the front HS spar. There were a couple of rivets in the HS710 and HS714 that the hand squeezer just could not reach because of the size of the angle aluminum stiffeners. For these, I employed my first use of the 3x rivet gun. I made the mistake of not clamping down the spar as I bucked with one hand and riveted with the other. The spar moved around causing my rivet gun to jump on the rivet head. This movement of the 3x gun on the rivet head resulted in some marring and un-even rivets. I drilled the bad rivets out (3 total), and proceeded to rivet again, this time with the spar clamped securely to the work bench. The results were great. I also placed some blue painters masking tape on the end of the rivet set, this did a good job leaving the rivets heads clean. |
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October 3, 2004: (3
hrs) Today's work started out by riveting the 404 and 405 ribs to
the front HS spar. There was one rivet that had to be drilled out
and replaced because, for some reason, the flange did not get held
tightly up against the front HS spar.
The first skin rivets were set today with the help of my father-in-law. I don't think I would have been able to do this with out a second person helping out. We started my riveting the center nose rib to the top then bottom of the skin. This turned out to be quite the challenge. We were not sure what bucking bar from the Avery toolkit to use, because it was not evident that any of them would fit into the confined space to set the forward most rivets. I ended up polishing a new edge on the bucking bar (I think it was the 2 lb. bar). The bottom right corner of this picture shows the bucking bar we used. The edge I polished and used for bucking is laying down on the workbench. In this picture you can see the nose rib riveted into place and the forward protective plastic now being removed.
Here is a shot of the nose rib rivets from the outside. I think they came out great considering this was the first time that either of us had riveted.
Next, the nose rib for the right side of the HS was riveted in the same fashion. Now that we had the process down, it only took us 20 minutes to complete (as opposed to 1 hour for the left side).
We found it best to rivet the middle nose rib while the HS stood up vertically in a cradle. I made a couple of cut-outs in some scrap plywood with my jig saw after tracing the inward and outward ribs onto the wood. This picture show the HS in the jig after we cleco'd in the front spar in place.
Things are really coming together nicely. Now that I have the knack of riveting down, I think the rest of the HS rivets will go relatively quickly.
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October 8, 2004: (3.5
hrs) Today was a big day. I had my helper again and we cranked
through all the rivets on the HS. My first milestone of the
project has been achieved.
Here the skin is being flush riveted with the 3x gun to the h702 spar.
Here I am squeezing edge rivets along the rear HS spar
Here is a picture of the inside rivets along the center rib before I removed the plastic (yes, I remembered) and put on the rear spar.
This is me with the completed HS |