Horizontal Stabilizer Completed

Over the weekend and into the week nights I made it a point to go out in the garage and work on the build even if I only had a few minutes.  The mundane actions of deburring, match drilling and dimpling really beat you down after some time.  Breaking it up into 30 mins here or there is almost like sprinting... force yourself to go a little bit more and then stop... recover and go again. I didn't take pictures of the match drilling part because it's really not that exciting, but it has to be done so that's what I did.  After that disassembled the HS and laid all the parts out ensuring they were properly labeled and clear of any sharp edges.

Dimpling the substructure pieces is easy.  My youngest daughter even made a comment about how fast I was at it now.  I just use the pneumatic squeezer, place it on my thigh and just run the part through it.  I have to at times make myself slow down, so I don't end up accidentally putting unneeded holes into the pieces.   Same with the skins, just use the squeezer on all the edges you can get to and the Cframe and table for the rest.   I got bored extremely fast on the Cframe, it may have taken 2 hours to dimple the skins but that was broken out into an entire day... I would go hit it for 20 mins and then go do something else.  I did feel I improved my technique... I used to double tap with a mallet but now I just do a single strike.  That seems to work as well and in the off chance it pops out of the hole I don't end up hitting it again and making a dimple or hole where it doesn't need to be.

For where the nose ribs go you can't bend the skin enough to use the Cframe, nor can you use the squeezer.  Instead you use a cherry 'pop' rivet gun and a close quarters dimple set.  I've read someone used this on their entire RV build... that would add hundreds of hours to an RV-10 build.

Dimple die set

Ensure dimple side is where you want it.

Apply enough pressure to squeeze set together, too much you're break it.

Finished dimple

After all dimples were complete I was ready to get to priming.  Given the amount of substructure pieces and the importance of position I labeled all pieces to include the spars to increase my chances of getting it put back together correctly.  During the process of cleaning with PreKote all the ink goes away so my method was to line the pieces up in order and flip them once clean so when they were dry I could relabel.

Another note is you have to countersink about 300 holes on the spars after they've already been primed once.  I decided to reprime the flanges after countersinking and cleaning the holes.

After 24 hours I was ready to start putting the stringer assembly together with rivets and then start cleco'ing up the Horizontal Stabilizer together.  A little time saver tip is you don't need to cleco every single hole.  Space them out by about 3 or 4 and then all cross-section pieces and if there are some holes that don't line up then you can put them in every hole in that area.

Surprisingly I was able to knock out all the skin riveting and finally assembly in one long evening.  It takes a lot of time to rivet.  Things that slow you down are when you mess up a rivet and have to drill it out.  Or just taking the time to get the bucking bar in place and then focusing on using the gun.  I'm not sure how I feel about some of my riveting.  For example, some of the nose ribs seems to have a bit of an indention to it.  From videos I've seen and people I've talked to this is normal... not every rivet you drive is going to be 'perfect'.  All the scuffs, scratches, dents and dings as long as they're not major can get fixed prior to paint.  I assume it's akin to using Bondo as a filler on a car, not really sure how that will work with rivets though...  Guess I'll figure that out later.

As a perfectionist this bothers me....

Another possible time saver is I watched a video of a guy doing the HS skin and it looked like he did every rivet one at a time.  Place the rivet in, get the bar set and rivet... rinse repeat.  I did this for about 5 rivets and figured the tape method would work better.  So that's what I did, laid the HS... well horizontal and placed the row of rivets in where I wanted to lay them.  Using clecos in specific places helped keep everything together.  The rest was a matter of starting on the inner section and moving outward.  That kept everything in place, similar to placing a cleco right next to the hole you're riveting. Took a bit of set up time to do this but once I was ready to drive the rivets I put the HS back up vertically and just moved down the line, bucking bar in one hand, rivet gun in the other.  Even with having to drill out about 5 rivets it still took me maybe 3 hours max for the inside rivets.

Taped rivets over forward spar

With the end in sight I pushed on to do the rest of the riveting.  The last set of 200 or so rivets can be done with the squeezer.  Was able to just lay them all out and just roll through them along with the web cherry rivets and thus completing the HS stabilizer.

I look rough after hours of riveting!

Speaking of cleaning my garage/workshop was bothering me the last couple days with partially completed pieces, drying pieces and in general a mess to look at and work in.  So, I took a few minutes to get everything organized and ready to jump back to the elevator.