Vertical Stabilizer

Continued work on the Vertical Stabilizer.  I'm making progress at a much slower rate than anticipated, several people including myself are a bit surprised that I'm not in the garage 6 hours every night and the entire weekend. This is largely due to my constant need of understanding of what I'm doing and any question having to research it until my level of comfort is such that I can continue.

Once again other people's online logs of their builds and especially videos by Jason Ellis have been great.  I'm able to see a completed piece, get a warm fuzzy and move on.  So far, I've put together the substructure, have done all the deburing, cleco, uncleco and more deburing activities. Using the pneumatic squeezer (Fantastic tool) and a C-frame tool I've dimpled all the parts and skin accordingly.

Looks somewhat like a plane part

Now it looks like a plane part

Shiny and dimpled

As you can tell by the picture above I completely removed the blue protective plastic coating. Typically, builders leave the external skin coating on as an added layer of protection.  Prior to this picture I had done the same using a soldering iron to remove the pieces over the holes, leaving large squares of material.  It's not as if it was extremely time consuming, but it seemed like an unneeded step.  Two main factors to my decisions were that Vans themselves says you should remove it from parts within 2 weeks, the other is I don't plan to have the outside of the plane painting until at least 50 hours of flying.  So any scratches that occur will probably happen during that time... so I made the executive decision to remove it... plus plain aluminum is Sexy.

Given my new stance on removing all the coating I had to child proof my main work bench.  Doing so required me to put a protective coating of indoor/outdoor carpet reducing the change to scrap up the parts.

Something else I had to deal with was improving my efficiency at dimpling the skins.  Now the pneumatic squeezer is a fantastic tool to dimple with, however with a 3" yoke that limits your ability to dimple the inside sections of the skins.  I found myself on my garage floor wrestling with a small piece of carpet, the skin, a hammer and the C-frame tool.  Even with two people it was a constant struggle to ensure you weren't torqueing the skin piece in such a manner to side load the dimple. I guess that's why people build platforms for their C-frame tool.... So, following the trend I used plans that came with a tool and put together a carpet covered platform of my own.  It's a bit large but less than 3" deep I can easily place it against a wall when not in use.