We have an Empennage!

It's celebration time! Mark and his dad completed the empennage kit on Father's day, with Dad pulling the last rivets. Congratulations guys! The full story is below.

Tuesday June 15th was devoted to installing the portable AC in the garage.  Since nothing is ever easy (at least with projects around our house) it took a bit of rigging so that it would look nice.  The exhaust tubing was 5 inches in diameter which as it turns out is VERY non standard for venting. As a result, Mark spent much time at Lowe's looking for appropriate connections.  He bought 4 inch and 6 inch vents, tubing, and an assortment of connections to hoping he could fit them together in some way to make it all work. Needless to say, even with all of the random pieces and parts there was just no way to make it work! I had to run out for some errands so I dropped by Home Depot to see if they had any 5 inch material. At first, I could find nothing but after a careful search of every bit of ventilation equipment I found a 5 inch to 4 inch reducer. Finally, something that might work. I brought it home and after trimming and siliconing (verb?), Mark was able to rig a vent together. This took, of course, all day, so there was no time to work on the plane and we thought we should let the silicone dry before testing the AC in the absolute hottest part of the day.

On Wednesday June 16th Mark was excited to head out to the garage and crank on the A/C. Considering the garage is completely uninsulated, it did a pretty good job. The temperature started at 82, dropped to 78, and then fought the heat degree by degree until it reached about 84 in late afternoon.  Keep in mind the outside afternoon temperature was in the mid 90s, so 84 felt almost Arctic. (Note the keyword there is "almost".)

Since Mark had some cooler air, he worked on deburring the side skins. Each hole needing to be deburred on one side, and each side skin needed filing along with deburring and sanding.  Since Mark was now working on the last few skins he realized that it would be better to get everything clecoed to the tail cone so he could flip the empennage crate on its side. After taking care of this space saving rearrangement, Mark came out to the pool to let me know what he'd accomplished.  Grinning like a little boy, he gleefully reported "It's a weird feeling having the container emptied, but in reality I"ve just about finished the first sub-kit of my airplane!"

Mark didn't spend any time working on the plane on Thursday as we needed to take care of some minor details around the house and had a meeting with our general contractor and the head carpenter concerning the room addition that we're starting in July.  It was a very exciting meeting and we wrote a check which is the deposit for the job! We are pretty excited to get this project going and are looking forward to having the porch as a truly useable space instead of just storage area. After the meeting we spent time "shopping" (on-line) for the appropriate ceiling fans that will go in the new room.  We found some Hunter fans at a great price and bought four, two for the new room and two to replace the fans we currently have in our living room.

Mark got an early start on Friday and was able to stay ahead of the heat. He started by de-clecoing the side skin and top skin and then spending some quality time deburring and breaking edges. It sounds quick and innocuous but it really takes some time. Once this was done, he clecoed everything back together and worked on the static system. He had to insert a couple of rivets that get the core knocked out so it will pass air. He worked on connecting silicone tubing, routing it along the empennage j-channels, and siliconing it to the clecos. The RV-12 has a static port on each side which is different from the 172’s that Mark did the majority of his flight training in as they only have ports on one side. He also match drilled some holes on the stabilator bracket and worked on dimpling and priming the stabilator rib.

On Saturday Mark de-clecoed the top skin and then deburred the holes that he drilled yesterday. He also took a slow and careful look at each and every rivet in the tail cone for the 3rd time since the plan was to close it up on Sunday. Once the tailcone is closed it would be a huge undertaking to get to any of the internal parts again so Mark took detailed pictures of the tail cone using my new cool camera. Mark also riveted the nut plates on the VS rib and then clecoed everything back together. We wanted to give Dad the honor of helping to rivet the tail cone closed on Father’s Day.

A side note: the ceiling fans we'd ordered were delivered and Mark spent MANY hours replacing the old with the new.  It was a miserably difficult job (have I mentioned that all of our projects always take 10 times longer and are 100 times more difficult than we expect) as nothing from the old fans would work with the new. They look FANtastic and Mark did a FANominal job. Luckily the brain has no memory of pain, so I'm sure within a few days he'll love them as much as I do.

Dad came over early on Father's Day to help rivet the tail cone closed. After a short bit of working out a system, they settled into a rhythm of Mark de-clecoing and inserting rivets while he followed along with the pneumatic rivet gun to finish the job. To make access a bit easier, they rolled the empennage on its side and just did the work atop the workbenches rather than moving to the sawhorses. In no time at all, they had finished the job and effectively, the empennage kit!

The Last Rivet!

Mark still has a little bit of work to do in constructing the trim motor support and trimming the fiberglass caps for the rudder and vertical stabilizer but those few details are all that remain. We are still waiting on the wing kit but Mark was told last week that it should get here by the first week in July. We need to call again to get an update.

So here are the numbers: we finished the original container of 2500 pop rivets and opened the first box of 1000 on Father's day. After looking back over his build log Mark thinks that the total time on the empennage kit came to 166 hours. (Although there are no guarantees on this number, as he determined it with quick mental math.)  Next up. . .the wings (when we get them) Mark thinks he remembers reading in a blog that the wing kit takes 5500 rivets to complete!!! As they say, one step at a time!