Flying Surface Practice Project (part 1)

Third project and probably the most exciting one. This thing actually looks like a mini wing. It has a spar, stiffners, ribs and most of the techniques to be used on the real airplane are needed to complete this little piece.

Startoff by cutting and preparing stiffners. Used snips to cut them along a line and while the result was quite ok, the fact that I cut it in steps later translated to the polishing stage and I ended up with a small step along the line. Not nice. Lesson learned. Next time even out along the entire line with a vixen file, then polish and end up with a straight line. The second stiffner is much better. Progress!

Another first is edge spacing. The edges need to be cleaned up and it’s easy to lose track on the Scotchbrite wheel. I’m loving the wheel but ended up with one hole only marginal with regards to edge spacing. Mental note for later!

Dimpling the skins and stiffners gave the first good use of my DRDT-2. I’m so loving this thing. Contrary to the typical C-Frame where you whack  it like an anvil, here you just press dimples into the material in a very controlled fashion and the result is beautiful if I say so myself.  I only ordered the front end kit to economize on shipping costs (airfreight for a chunk of steel doesn’t come cheap), and had my buddy Gunther (shoutout to Gukke 😉 weld a frame. He went well above and beyond and did the whole thing in stainless. That thing is a piece of art.

Next step was backriveting . My first experience with the rivet gun wasn’t great. To much pressure  resulted in the gun jumping all over the place, except for driving proper rivets. Backriveting actually came quite easy. I couldn’t yet year the difference in sound as the rivet changed shape but I tried to time it so that I understood how long it took to drive a proper rivet.  Overall I was quite happy with the result. Just shows that backriveting gives a much more uniform result then riveting with a bucking bar on the other end.

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