Today I finished the aluminum belly piece, at least for now. I wanted to further test my wingtip strip technique, so I put in a few rivets.
I'm using the -4 rivets to fill the holes from the first round of wingtip screws, and the -3 rivets to fill the holes from the old rivets.
Here's the results of an order from the Yard, thanks to a little Christmas money.
Today Tabitha came out and started working on her toolbox practice kit. The weather was nice, so we opened up the hangar door and let some sunshine in. I made more progress on drilling out the rivets that held on the nutplates for the wingtip screws, and started making the first strip for the wingtip support.
Tabitha Squeezes Rivets
This is the Flush Mount Wingtip Support. Note the 1/4\
I used the snips to cut into the 1/4″ hole, leaving the original hole as the inside of the new “V.”
Each cutout matches a rib flute. I had to give the strip a little bit of a bend so that it would fit the airfoil shape more naturally.
The wingtip support strip also makes a nice set of teeth.
Today I finally got a nice middle joining angle for the two belly pieces, on the 4th attempt. It looks fine now. I spent the rest of the time drilling out rivets on the wingtip.
I really thought that attempt number 3 was going to be a good one, but I drilled the holes too close to the edge.
Note that the edge distance is way too short on the bottom strip.
This joining piece is more complicated than a joggle, but I think it will help give the entire panel some good stiffness.
I drilled, deburred, and dimpled the holes, and now it's time to squeeze a few rivets.
Squeezing Rivets!
If I were starting with a fresh kit, I would have probably just planned to mount the wingtips by overlapping them above the wing skin. In this case, the holes in the fiberglass aren’t quite as I would like to have them. The end result is a little bit of waviness between the screws. There isn’t anything wrong with this really, in fact it is how lots of other airplanes look. But, since I’d like to try and smooth out the waves, I’m going to do it differently. Since the holes in the fiberglass are just slightly off, it would be quite difficult to attempt to drill new holes right next to them. To solve this dilemma, I’ve decided to mount the wingtips so that the fiberglass butts up against the wing skin, with a little support strip underneath.
Here are a few holes after I've drilled the rivets out.
After drilling out a few rivets, it starts to get to be pretty easy.
I only had half an hour to work today, but I made up another aluminum attach/stiffener for the belly panels to join with. When I drilled the holes, it turns out that the angle piece wasn’t wide enough, and thus the edge distance from the rivets was way too small. See pictures in the next entry.
Today I worked on installing the left side belly panel. It is the same as yesterday’s entry, but just on the other side of the airplane.
Here is the left side still as a blank.
Here's a picture of me trimming the part.
Here's my first attempt at a piece to use for joining the two panels together. It is way too skinny!
Today I was working on the new aluminum piece that goes on the belly just aft of the exhaust tunnel. I decided to remake these pieces because of some mismatched holes, and so that I could make the panel in two pieces. By making the left and right halves separate, I feel like I can have a closer fit around the landing gear shock struts, and I can add a dual-purpose aluminum angle joining and stiffening piece in the middle.
I started out by using the old one-piece belly section as a guide. I used .025 2024T3 stock to cut the flat blanks, then slowly started adding in the various perimeter shapes. I bent the very slight bend on my toy bench top brake, and then cut and trim to make the fit just right. Here are some pictures of the part clecoed in place.
Here is a view of the right side panel from above. The floorboards are out in this picture.
Here is another view from above, including the new aluminum side piece, which joins to this belly piece.
This picture is looking up from the left side.
Here is the mostly finished part. It still lacks a joining tab aft of the landing gear hole, and hasn't been dimpled yet. I've been holding off on dimpling any of the boot cowl parts, since I'm still not entirely sure about how all of that is going to go together.
Here I am deburring the aluminum panel that goes on the right side.
I wanted to get in a little more welding practice and I needed to make a gift for our dirty santa gift exchange, so I made this guy out of some scrap materials:
Evil Creature
Welding the other side of the fuselage went much faster, and it turned out better.
New Steel Support in Place
I used a little rattle-can primer to keep the metal from rusting. I’ll replace that with some epoxy primer when the weather warms up, so that I can be sure that the covering process won’t lift the paint.