Ha ha... yeah that was the intention, happy
it worked on you 😉

Thanks, will land at the garage tomorrow, and double
check our tooks 👍

I'm really enjoying this thread.
 

Roman and Dima:
For guy who has barely ever left the US I am finding your thread incredibly interesting. I guess I fall into the class of an ignorant American who has very little knowledge of the rest of the world.

I am finding the small peek into your lives fascinating. I really like the large photos where I can see all the detail of what you are doing - and your very cool shop.

Your thread is as much a human interest story as it is a build log, as far as I am concerned.

Thank you for taking the time to share part of your lives with the rest of the world!

Gary Welch, Cloverdale California

PS: I, for one, would love to see the occasional pic of the area where you live and work. Pics could be of anything that gives a little day to day insight. Not sure if I'm the only one who feels this way but I think it would be cool.

Hey Gary,

Thanks a lot for the inspirational note. We really
want to have global multicultural discussion about
aviation and beyond.

If anytime you decide to fly over the middle east, we
have a small airport 5 minutes from our workshop.
You can google for LLIB. We always have plenty
of good cold beer in the fridge. Just let us know. 🍻

.

Status Report: #4

That report is about:

• Vertical Stabilizer - Section 6
• Rudder - Section 7

Finally after many months of waiting we have
all the complete plane organized on the shelfs.
Sunday morning we took a deep breath and dived
into the real work. First one was the VS.

.

• Vertical Stabilizer - Section 6

The Vertical stabilizer is a good place to start: it is
designed out of few parts for the sceleton and one bended
piece of an aluminium skin. The construction of the web is
a pretty straight-forward thing: the rear spar and the front
spar are connected via 3 ribs. A couple of reinforcement
plates to make their reinforcment thing are in some critical
points, and the web is ready for the skin.




Once done, the web is fitting perfectly into the skin. Once
the skin is there: cleco-cleco to see it is solid and all the
holes of the skin are directly with the rib holes under them.
If all match driling the holes according to the map. Most of
the holes 3/32''. Dimpling the skin - took overall 1.5 hours
a single person to accomplish.

Exactly as the training project -- just a bit larger.

Done: disconnecting all of it and throwing back to the
shelf for latter priming.

.

• Rudder - Section 7

Rudder has a bit more complicated structue. You have to
cutout this sharp spears that will form the ribs of the
construction. The reason is simple -- the trailing edge of a
rudder is sharp and all the profile is more triangle-shaped,
so a regular type of rib won't fit here. That is why you form
7 DIY special sharp ribs from pair of spear formed pieces
of metal.



When you have the custom ribs ready, you have to adjust
the counter balance weight for a special rib placed
on top of the construction. That one will be connected
with the nut plates and boltes.






That brings us to the final construction. The skins
are two separate pieces of aluminum that can be easy
connected to each side of the assembly. Still all
clecco-connected, but looking like a real tail.

.

• Summary

That two assemblies proved to be a good starting point,
being not very 'heavy' but allowing to study some new
tricks -- and we went through the first scary moments of
drilling the real plane. The progress is pretty cool, in first
21 hours of such a mutual work we are ready to prime two
first constructions of our bird. It wasn't that hard but
mostly like some straight-forward experinece,
and we had a lot of fun during this 3 days.



Cheers.
Roman & Dima

.

Status Report: #5

That report is about:

• Day of the Priming
• The First Fuc*kUp

We had enough aluminum now to make a pause
in the construction process and declare on the priming
session.

There is an endless debate whether to prime or not. We
personally decided im favor of priming without doubt. That
monstrous humidity that we usually have like we usually
have on a sea shore of theMideterenians with 40°C make
even clecco russty.

.

• Day of the Priming

What did we use: Alodine 1200 - for aluminium conversion
coating. Another protection layer is Strontium Chromate.

The process compounds of several steps:

1. Scuffing the metal a little with scotch or some sand paper
2. Washing all the dust away with the tinner.
3. Putting on Alodine with a flannel.
4. Waiting 15 minutes for Alodine to make its effect
5. Washing everything with watter

[Now it is ready for priming.]

6. Before spraying we usually go over with the Antisilicon
7. Spraying the Strontium easily not to make the layers
too heavy, cause they may flow down.

Here are some pictures of the chemicals we use:







The actual painting:








It took us some time to make a good hand for spraying
the color, so we moved carefully, putting very thin layers
of color and waiting them to dry up. But later we got some
boost of confidence and flushed through this work very
efficiently finishing the preparation of two first parts
of the empeanage.


.

• The First Fuc*kUp

I guess it happens in life of every builder and always
in the moment you mostly not expect it. So here is what
happened: we bought a very cool scuffing instrumment,
and it worked very well on an open and wide surfaces.
It worked so well that you could have scuffed tens of
square meters in 10 minutes. The problem was on the
dimpled spots, the cone of the dimple was rising a bit high
above the skin and the roughness of the sand paper was a
bit higher than required for that type of aluminium.
The result was broken holes and the whole skin thrown
to the garbage.

The full discussion on forum can be seen here: [link].
I will give some more sad picture of this event.







.

• Summary

Anyway, omitting the sad part that cost us $500, the
coating process went pretty good, and after
14 man-hours we are finally ready to rivet our very
first structures. I don't have enough words to describe the
excitment for our first week progress. See you the
upcommimg weeks!






Cheers.
Roman & Dima

Some paint fumes, a couple beers....
 

A good day!

Yeah, more sweet days to come.

Very fun build log to read, keep up the good work! First mistake is the worst, you will get used to them. :D I have a bucket of screw up parts now...

Yeah, pretty stupid mistake but, we studied
how to do it right and moving forward.

:D