The control surface project continues. Worked 7 hours today.
First job after cutting the stiffereners is deburrig all the components. I use the deburr knife twice per side. This gives the sides allready a safe edge. Hower I can not resist very lightly polishing it afterwards on the scotchbrite wheel.
It gives the aluminum that nice and shiny look. I removed the plastic using a soldering iron as shown in many instruction video's and found out it works quite well.
It's easy to remove the plastic and it does not leave marks on the material. In the next picture, the sides are deburred, the plastic top and bottom side removed to allow the stiffereners to be placed and clecoed.
Next step is dimpling the skins and stiffeners with the 3/32 dimplie dies. I used the C-Frame. The skins require just some very light taps. Don't overdo this or you end up with an enlarged whole or a too deep dimple.
As an exercise, I'm trying to keep the plastic protection on as long as possible.
The plans call out for back rivetting the stiffeners to the skin. Pay special attention to the direction of the stiffeners, there are right side and left side stiffeners. Best here seriously think about it once, and then mark the material with a marking pen.
The backrivetting of 3-3 rivets is starting to go well. Better then the first time. I can only confirm what the video's say, rivetting is not exact science, it is an art. Certainly these small ones are easily over-set. To make sure about the quality of my rivets, I started calculating how much the 1.5 diameter actually is and used the caliper to measure my offset. It turns out that I'm doing fine. When the rivet fills the diameter whole of the rivet gauge, it is actually perfectly set. It is also a matter of calibrating your eye. I'm starting to get to the point where I can more or less see what the quality of my rivet is. I guess that is what these training projects are all about: getting used to the material and learning by experience.
The next construction step is building the skelecton. I clecoed the ribs, spar and reinforcement plates together and back drilled the spar and remaining holes in the reinforcement plate.
Then after deburring the holes, It's rivetting time again. The ribs and reinforcement plate are riveted with solid rivets 4-4.
The rivetting went fine but I noticed some inperfections here on the side of the rib flange. You can see in the picture below that the aluminym of the rib flange curls up a bit as the rivet sets near the end.
I drilled out the rivets and started all over, first prebending lightly the flange but I ended up with the same result. If someone can confirm this is normal, I would feel a lot better.
The end of a days work. The skins clecoed and matchdrilled to the ribs. The skin matchdrilled to the spar and the trailing wedge inserted and drilled at 86° angle.
