Yesterday I completed the right wing leading edge, cleaned up some shop area, moved the tail cone to a better storage location, and then made a test fit of the left wing leading edge to the main spar. The fit looked good.
I have one rivet I need to drill out and re-set on the left wing rear spar, and then I will begin the top skin riveting process.
Completed fabrication and match drilling of wing tie-down mounts. Etched and primed, installed nutplates. 1 hour.
Installed brackets by riveting. Installed aileron bellcrank brackets and torqued bolts. Applied torque seal.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve completed a number of steps and logged in my paper log, but haven’t really updated the progress here.
So, in the interest of completeness, and while some primer dries, here’s an update.
4/23/2016
RHS Main spar countersinking–finished the rib/skin attach countersinks; need to complete nutplate holes.
3 hours.
4/26/2016
Received confirmation that J stiffeners can be extended with no negative (from Van’s Aircraft). Misalignment of spars and J channels required either re-making the channels or extending them.
Made Four J-Stiffener extensions approximately 9-1/8″ long each. This allows overlap of 3 rivets in the splice joint.
0.5 hour
4/27/2016
LH Spar bottom countersink complete. Top remains.
1.5 hours
4/30/2016
Machine countersank all lower fuel tank attach screw holes after installing the nutplates on the LH main spar
5 hours.
5/11/2016
Countersank RH main spar top tank attach screw holes
1 hour.
5/14/2016
“Completed Page 13-3 – Finished RH and LH main spar countersinks, installed inspection plate nutplates and countersank.
Spot primed. Widened hole in LH Spar–all per plans. Also primed spar web extensions and doublers.
5 hours
5/15/2016
“Completed page 13-2 step 4 – Web extension riveting, both wings.
Page 13-4, steps 1,2,3,4,5,7 completed L&R. 8&9 completed RH only.”
7 hours.
Total hours to date: 85.75
Just about 5 hours (including a few short breaks) to countersink the holes on the top flange of the right hand main spar. About 308 holes, so roughly 1 per minute. Only about 930 left to go…I’m beginning to see why it takes people over 2,000 hours to build an RV-10!
Steps 2 and 3 on Page 13-3 of the RV-10 Wing plans can be rather confusing as to which holes to countersink. The language seems to be rather precise, and if taken literally, has you looking for holes that aren’t there.
The confusing sentence in Step 2 is
“Machine countersink those rib to spar flange attach rivet holes that are in line with the nutplate attach rivet holes and are inboard of the most outboard fuel tank attach nutplate.”
It’s not a difficult sentence to parse, particularly, and the latter third is quite clear. The first half, however, indicates that there should be some (rib to spar flange attach) holes IN LINE with the nutplate rivet holes. Well, if taken literally, there are NO SUCH HOLES. There are some holes that partially fit the description, but they are not exactly in line with the nutplate rivet holes–but their centerlines are about 1/16″ of an inch aft of the nutplate rivet holes’ centerlines. To someone like me who tends to read things very literally, this sentence has the potential to introduce significant confusion and frustration.
I had read aloud and thought about these steps for FAR too long, and finally decided that someone else surely has had the same confusion. So a simple search on Van’s Air Force Forums produced this gem of a thread, which I recommend to anyone as confused as I was.
A link from that thread, provided by Mike Jimenez, contains some helpful photos.