Stall Warner Installed

It was quite an exiting day today. Besides installing the stall warner I also found a mistake I had made when riveting the nose ribs to the left spar. But let's start in chronological order.
I've assembled the stall warning subassembly and followed the instruction and the figures precisely. It was reported before that the washers used to position the vane in the center of the cutout of the center skin might not be thick enough. My stack of 5 washers measured .155" and as I had exactly the amount of washers that Van's mentioned in the manual I couldn't change this, so I went ahead and put the skin on to do the fine adjustment. Or so I wanted.
When I screwed the subassembly onto the rib I noticed that I could not turn the unit to adjust the vane position. The upper cutout in the base plate was a bit too narrow to allow the plate to move around the screw. So I took the subassembly off again, clamped it in the vise and filed the opening a bit wider. Back on the rib it proved to be usable now, so on with the skin and voila!
The vane was perfectly centered and almost perfectly adjusted as well. The fine adjustment is really tricky as most humans don't have arms long enough to get around both sides of the skin to manipulate the screw and the subassembly at the same time. While having x-ray vision to see through the upper part of the skin that blocks a view with ordinary eyes to see what you're doing. Somehow I managed to do all that without super-powers and I hope that tightening the screws after removing the skin did not change the adjustment or I will have to go through this again before riveting it on.
Wires installed and although I was afraid of having now connection to common ground because of all the primer I must have been lucky as the switch connected perfectly when agitated.



It was when I clecoed the skin on that I got to the most outboard rib where the center skins attaches to that I realized that this one didn't have a flange for the hole I was supposed to cleco. I went around it during the adjustment but then when the skin was removed I realized that I must have messed up the stack of ribs (again) when I prepared for the riveting. Somehow I got the one rib in there that is supposed to go onto the right side in the stiffener block at the root of the wing as this one has to have the nose flanges removed. The one I had put aside for this job was in the workshop and had the flanges!


The solution was simple but with the ribs installed maybe hard to do. I measured the room in between the ribs and yes, with the rivet removing tool in the chuck my shortest drill was too long to position on the rivets cleanly. Fortunately I had bought an angle drill a while back at HF and put it in storage (you can never have too many tools). This was now a real life saver!
I located the angle drill, put the remover tool on and voila! It fit easily between the ribs to get the job done.



This tool made it very easy as the tip positions the drill perfectly centered using the manufactured head to align the drill bit. You push the spinning drill bit down and the head goes flying. It helps to first push the mandrel all the way down by using a center punch a few times on each rivet. Once the head's gone, the shaft of the rivet can be pushed out with the center punch.


The rest was a cake walk! The correct rib clecoed in place and riveted on in minutes. The rivet removing tool is so gentle that you can hardly tell that the removed rib was actually used before.


Now, something like this better not happen on the 4 inboard ribs as they are so close that even an angle drill won't help you. You'd have to remove more than just one in that case. Also I'm not sure if the rivet remover would be so nice to use on the spar flanges for the ribs that are riveted to the angle tab AND the spar. The flange on the spar side is very narrow and I doubt this would have had such a nice happy ending like the one I had to repair.
So, the warning is: Double or triple check that you have the right rib in the right place before riveting!

Scrubbing Along...

The last two days I was coming home from the day job and preparing the next stack of ribs for priming by scrubbing them with Cortec 440. There's really not a lot to report about that and I'm sure you're already grown tired of photos of different stacks of aluminum piling up. So here's one from the actual activity.


It's a real boring job and so I try to do 6 ribs a night, hoping that this way my mind is not overly numbed by this activity but yet enough to build a nice stack for the priming during day time on the weekend.
I just realized that preparing the ribs for the right wng is not the right thing to do as I want to finish the left one first, so after I finished my ribs for the night, I did some prep work on the skins for the left wing. Mainly sorting and organizing so I have easy access to the skins when I need them.

Left Wing Skeleton Done

That was a long day today. I started at 11 am with cleaning the prepped ribs by wiping them with Acetone. There's always some residue on them that I want to get off. The primer sticks much better on clean aluminum.
Then I went on shooting the primer on 14 ribs. That went pretty quickly with the big gun but I needed some time detailing to really be happy with the result. Because of the large amount of ribs I had to utilize my trucks' hood as a drying rack.


That way I could shoot the next stack while the previous one was drying on one side. I think that was the main reason why the process went fairly fast.

After some time cleaning up and getting the paint out of the gun in which the primer had some time to settle, I went on to prepare the fun of the day: riveting those ribs to the spar!



I followed the plans, started outboard and worked my way inboards - rib by rib. This way I had enough room to rivet the ribs with the manufactured head on the ribs as they asked to do.


Here the outboard 5 are done.

When getting further inboard the ribs have to be riveted to the flange angle as well as to the spar. These ribs then have a rear flange. When I riveted those I first riveted the upper and lower hole through the ribs web into the spar angle. Then I riveted one of the rear flange holes and then the web hole right in front of that. That way I had always enough room to get the P26A riveter lined up and didn't have to use a wedge tool.



Getting the inboard 4 ribs riveted was a pain. The spacing is so narrow that I could hardly get the riveter in there to do the job. This got real bad when the one -L rib (second from inboard) was riveted. This one goes in opposite to the other ribs which mean that then I had to rivet from the right. But on that side was already a rib installed, so I had to bend that one out of the way to be able to open the handles of the P26A. It's awkward but it worked without damaging anything.

After 3.5 hours of riveting I had this:



Just because I mentioned the time... so far I have been working more than 37 hours on the wing kit.

Finished Rib Prep Work for Left Wing

Just a short note... I finished the prep work on the ribs for the left wing tonight. Now I have a matte silver stack of ribs sitting in the workshop waiting to get wiped off with Acetone and get primed. There are 13 nose ribs plus the one hinge holding rib of the right wing and its bracket doubler.
Sounds like another busy weekend...

A Little Prep Work

The weekend is coming and I am getting ready for another primer-shooting session. As the days got rather short now in Southern Arizona, working during the week became less enjoyable as I have to use shop lights to light the working area if I can't do the job inside the workshop. This is certainly the case with the prep work as I don't want to deal with water and strong bases inside.
I found a workable arrangement putting the light far enough away so the bugs wouldn't bother me while still providing enough light on the part I'm working on.
Here's the stack of nose ribs for the left wing, plus one drilled rib for the right wing with its hinge bracket doubler. I do this in matching pairs so I don't mix them up when I remove the markings during the prepping and priming. After the primer dried they will get marked again so I know which bracket was used to drill which main rib. That way they should go together perfectly.


After two hours of scrubbing and rinsing I got 6 nose ribs done. Here are four hanging on the drying rack.


Van's has already sent the replacement main ribs that I had ordered late last week. I quickly deburred those two main ribs and re-completed the stack of main ribs that shouldn't get any modification. So the ribs for the right wing are also ready to go through the priming process. Pretty good timing as this will come next after I put the nose ribs on the left wing.
That is if I don't deviate from the plans that would like me to build both wing skeletons first before starting the skinning process. I think I don't have the room to store the relatively fragile skeleton of an unskinned wing while working on the other. At least not safely. So I think about completing one wing before starting to work on the other one.
I'll decide that when I can see how wobbly the skeleton is. If it is sturdy enough to sit in the wing cradle I can stick to the plans.

Fuselage Kit Arrived

The Fedex guy dropped by again and had my fuse kit this afternoon. Just one crate, but boy is this one heavy! 230 lbs and the create sure had it's problems. I saw a broken up side around a knot in the wood that started building a crack. I opened the box while the guy was still there to make sure everything was ok and it was!

After removing all the paper it appears like the crate could have been smaller with all the areas that seem to be missing parts.


I finished the inventory late tonight after 6 hours of going through the parts. Boy, this is a very large kit! I don't think it took me that long before to do the inventory. The amount of aluminum parts is amazing and there's a seemingly never-ending amount of paper bags.
This sure will take some time to put together. Anyway, for now I just put everything back in the box and store under the tailcone until I'm done with the wings.
2 screws were missing from one bag and that was it. This time a lot of the bags contained extra parts, so dropping one nut or a screw shouldn't cause any problems. Good job, Van's!

Main RIbs Riveted to Left Spar

With the efforts the of the last two days everything was ready to start on the left spar. Before I wanted to do that I wanted to catch up with a few left out tasks from the previous pages and get these out of the way. They consisted of riveting nutplates to 3 nose ribs and riveting the doublers to the front of two main ribs. That didn't take long - including one drill out procedure because of slipping off a rivet in the wrong moment. No harm done.


So here I was, rearranging the work area in expectation of the Fuse kit delivery tomorrow afternoon. Main goal: Getting the spar as close to the workshop as possible to ensure short ways when getting needed tools.


Here we go, ready to attach some ribs! Despite the manual telling me to cleco and rivet rib by rib (or at least that's what I translated from Oregonian), I decided to cleco all the ribs first before starting riveting.



Notice that the inboard rib is mounted with its rib double on the outboard side of the flange although this doesn't look right as the doubler will get bent in the riveting process. Van's and some blogs confirmed this is the way to go.


All ribs clecoed, ready to insert the rivets and start my favorite part! After about an hour of fun - well, partly as you either have to fiddle with the wedge tool or use the manual tight spaces riveter in between the inner ribs and on the rivets next to the spar bracket flange - it looked like this:



This went so well and there was still some energy left in me that I decided to go and add the rear spar as well. Besides, the whole structure is quite wobbly before you attach the rear spar and I didn't want to get anything damaged when I run into it at night.
The rear spar attachment requires some match drilling on the inboard rib. So on it goes for drilling...


... and off it comes for deburring and cleaning away the chips. Then it goes on again and the riveting starts. I don't want to bore you with the details, so here's the end result.


Make sure that you use LP4-4 on all four holes on the inboard rib, the one you match drilled before.



And that was the end for today! Nice looking wing that is... So, now the nose ribs have to get some prep 'n' prime treatment and then the left wing skeleton would be done.