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Squeezed in a few late night hours and made some good progress. First off I hung the finished horizontal stabilizer on the East wall of the shop. I had my MP3 collection on random, as I usually do, and I’ll be damned if “Tree Top Flyer” by Stephen Stills didn’t come on at the exact moment I set the HS on the mounting bracket on the wall. That was a neat coincidence.

After that I got the VS skeleton assembled and match drilled. I then proceeded to attach and match drill the VS skin as well. That’s where I decided to call it a night. Another good bit of progress made today.

I spent a little time going over the last rivets on the horizontal stabilizer today. I ended up drilling out three of them and re-squeezing every rivet on the edge to make the shop head just a little bit bigger.

After that I moved on to the vertical stabilizer. Didnt really get much done other than cleco the first few pieces together and match drill the top VS-410-PP hinge bracket. It’s a start!

Well I finally finished the first major sub-assembly of my RV. My torque-seal finally showed up so I put a bead on the rear spar bolts the other night. Tonight I finished riveting on the right skin and wrapped things up by attaching the rear spar.

The skins got a little more beat up than I wanted but overall I’m pretty happy with the finished product. I’m sure my workmanship will get even better and I progress through the rest of the kit.

Next up; the vertical stabilizer.

I got the right skin partially attached to the skeleton/left skin assembly. What a difference a day makes! The riveting I did on the skin today was vastly superior to my work from two days ago. Just a little more work and I’ll be ready to attach the rear spar.

You can also see what I spent some time on yesterday in one of the pics below; the beginning of a paint booth. Winter is coming in the midwest and that will be a huge help with priming parts as I finish the empennage and begin work on the wings.

For whatever reason I had a hell of a time riveting HS-708 today. Probably some of the poorest riveting work I’ve ever done. Once I got that out of my system though, finishing up the riveting of HS-702 went pretty well. One lesson I learned is to tape the flush rivets as if youre planning to back rivet them. This not only holds them in the hole better but also does a good job of protecting the skin from damage from the rivet gun.

Other than the amateurish work on HS-708 it was good progress made tonight. Next up is to do the same to the right side of the horizontal stabilizer.

Squeezed in a little time today riveting HS-706 to the left HS-601PP skin. I alternated between the pneumatic squeezer and rivet gun / tungsten bucking bar trying to decide which one I like better. The squeezer definitely has less chance of causing damage to the rib and skin surfaces but you really only get one chance to get it “right”. The couple rivets I ended up drilling out and re-setting were all done with the squeezer.

At any rate, I managed to get HS-706 fully riveted to the skin and it came out fairly good. I’ve seen prettier, but hey, I’m a beginner.

My additional cans of primer and my pneumatic squeezer trigger showed up today so I made a little progress on the horizontal stabilizer. I got the left skin primed and got HS-406, HS-407, and HS-408 ribs all clecoed to the skin. I also set my first couple flush rivets in the skin.

I had to drill out the first one I set but after that things turned out pretty good. I learned two more lessons tonight. One is that the DRDT-2 dimpler does a MUCH nicer job than the pneumatic squeezer. The squeezer distorts the skin just a little bit for some reason. Luckily you can re-dimple the same hole with the DRDT-2 and it gets rid of the distortion. The other is that I should probably be doing three coats of primer, or I need to make sure I’m priming in a slightly warmer environment. It was 48F outside and two coats of primer just didnt seem to coat very nicely like it did on the ribs a couple weeks ago.