2.8 Hours -
It’s been two weeks since I last worked on the plane. A couple of factors caused this. The main factor being that we are buying a house, and doing paperwork for the mortgage has taken up a lot of my free time. The good news is that we are buying the house we are currently renting, so I won’t have to deal with moving the RV project! The second, smaller factor contributing to my lack of airplane work has been the cold weather. I grew up in Nebraska, so the cold shouldn’t bother me. However, after a few years in Texas, I’ve become a cold weather wimp. The blizzard of 2011 that shut down San Antonio yielded a whole 1/4″ of snow. Yep, that’s all it takes to shut everything down in Texas! At least the temperature is back in the 70s this week.
I started doing a little work on the plane in the morning. I still had about half the right inboard bottom skin to rivet. After about a half-hour of working on this, my parents showed up and we went to lunch.
After lunch, my Mom went shopping and left my Dad to help on the plane. I went back to work riveting the inboard bottom skin, and I had my Dad start working on the bottom right outboard skin. This skin needed to have the vinyl removed and the holes deburred. I figured that would keep him busy for a while!
My Dad worked on prepping the bottom right outboard skin while I did some riveting.
The right bottom inboard skin is riveted.
Since it is time to put the outboard skins on the wing bottoms, I modified the wing cradle by removing some 2x4s that were holding the skins upright. Now the wing tips fit in the cradle and are out of the way.
I finished riveting the bottom right inboard skin, and started working on the cutout for the pitot mast on the left wing. The cutout is on the left bottom outboard skin, and I decided to place the pitot on the outboard side of the rib just outboard the bellcrank. The Safeair mast comes with descent instructions and a template for the cutout. Unfortunately, the instructions and template are for a RV-6 and need a little modification to work on the 7. However, it basically boils down to deciding where the mast will be placed, cutting the hole, and then modifying the mast slightly to make it fit against the rib and spar.
Once I decided where to place the mast, I taped the template to the wing skin and traced the cutout onto the skin. Next came the hard part…working up the courage to cut a big hole in the skin! I used a step drill to make the initial holes. Then I used my Dremel with a cutoff wheel to rough cut the hole. After that, it was a process of filing and test fitting the mast until the hole was finally the proper size.
I decided to place the pitot on the outboard side of the rib just outboard of the bellcrank.
Once the template was in place, I traced the pitot mast cutout onto the wing skin.
I made the first few holes in the pitot cutout with a step drill.
I finished the rough cut of the pitot mast hole with my dremel. Obviously, the hole still needs some finishing touches to smooth the edge.
After enlarging and smoothing the hole a bit, the pitot mast finally fit. The flange still needs some modification though.
While the mast fit the hole ok, one side of the mast’s flange was hitting the rib and the spar side of the flange was too long, overlapping a row of rivets holding the leading edge to the spar. To fix this, I filed down the rib side of the flange, and I’ll have to trim the spar side using my band saw. Nothing too complicated. Once I have the skin off the wing to finish prepping the rivet holes, I’ll also file the mast’s hole a bit more to give it a smoother finish.
The mast was designed for an RV-6. To get it to fit my wings, I needed to file down the edge of the flange that is up against the rib. I also need to cut about a quarter inch from the spar flange so that it doesn't overlap the leading edge rivets.
