Dimples and Deburring

All in all Mark had a very productive week. I didn't mention the other minor glitch that we suffered last weekend because it paled in comparison to the "broken" rib (okay so it wasn't broken, just malformed). Back in the fall of '09, while preparing to jump into this project, we purchased the RV12 tool kit from Avery tools. Included in the kit is a dimple die set, however one of the dies was missing. At the time that we received the tools we didn't know that it should have been included with the kit. Only when Mark wanted to work on the skins for the vertical stabilizer did it become apparent that he needed this dimple die. GRRRRR! Good thing Avery tools is located in Dallas, because he was able to order and receive the necessary die by Tuesday March 2.

Mark's week in the garage went something like this: Monday and Tuesday he spent much of his time deburring the skins for the vertical stabilizer trying to get the machine marks off the edges. Here is a snippet of our conversation:

Mark - "Just when you think you are done, you will rub a finger across the edge and feel a bump."

Nancy - "When will you ever be done? Or do you just decide that it's as good as you can get it?"

Honestly I'm really glad that it's Mark doing this part of the work, because the perfectionist in me would never be satisfied. One of the VAF (Van's Air Force) guys said that if you don't cut yourself when you put moderate pressure on your finger and run it along the edge then you've done enough deburring; so this is the test we're using.

Mark ordered a Scotch Brite wheel for the Dremel which should help, but decided to cut some small Scotch Brite wheels from a red pad until he gets them. It seemed to work okay but wore out pretty quickly. I'm sure that the deburring skill will be one that he will master eventually; he certainly will get plenty of practice.

On Tuesday, having received the aforementioned dimple die, Mark moved onto some dimpling and installation of nut plates. He squeezed over 72 dimples in the skins for the VS for both, the screws and the nutplates; then an additional 36 holes in the nutplates themselves. Again, I'm glad it's Mark doing this work as it doesn’t take much force to put a dimple in the soft aluminum, but the squeezer itself is quite heavy and unwieldy. I think I'll wait until the pneumatic rivets come out =).

I may be biased, but those are the best looking dimples I've ever seen!

Thursday he squeezed the 36 rivets for the nutplates on the VS skin and then ran a screw through each plate to ensure that all was well. The good engineers at Boeing developed something called Boelub, a stick lubricant, which is placed onto the screws before running them through the plates. This worked amazingly well as the screws turned in effortlessly. He also started work on the rudder spar caps since almost everything that can be done for the vertical stabilizer had been done. On a side note Mark's dad brought his new BMW 135 I over and we all had to go on a test drive. What a beast! Too bad we had to deal with rush hour traffic.

Sweet Ride!

Dimples and Nutplates on the VS skin:

Which brings us to today . . . Saturday. . .a big day. It started with match drilling the rudder spar caps followed by a big deburring session involving the spar, the spar caps, the hinge brackets, and all of the ribs for the rudder. While Mark was working on cleaning all of those surfaces I was busy cleaning all of the household surfaces. As luck would have it right in the middle of all of that activity, FedEx drops the replacement Vertical Stabilizer rib off! (Did you happen to hear Mark's joyous whoop?) He then set about deburring that piece as well before washing everything in the kitchen sink while roughing it up with Scotch Brite then rubbing everything down with MEK before using the self-etching primer.

Everything is primed and ready:

It looks like the stage is set to build the VS skeleton tomorrow and then maybe, just maybe, we can get to work on skinning it. After a good week of necessary work it sure will be nice to get this show on the road!