Quickbuild Quality

Hi all,

I'm trying to help a friend who is interested in building an RV and he asked a question that I didn't have an answer for.

I built my RV-6 back in the dark ages before things were pre-punched (and we had to walk in the snow uphill both ways to get to the hangar).

So I'm curious as to the quality of the sheet metal work that has been seen in the last 6-12 months for the quickbuild kits.

If you have had a kit delivered or seen one recently, would you please respond to the poll?

Thanks,
Laird

No one's got an opinion?

If you don't want to say publicly, you can always PM me.

Any pirep would be appreciated.

Overall I would say its pretty good. There were some minor blemishes on the metal that could probably be polished out completely if you wanted to go the polished route, but some of them may show through. There wasn't anything that couldn't be covered with paint. Ive had more hanger rash happen while the wings were sitting in my garage then what the factory plus shipping did to them. The thing that got me the most was there are about 2-3 dozen rivets that have to be drilled out from the factory. Most are pop rivets and come out easily enough. They need to be there for structure for shipping. Theres about a dozen solid rivets on the longeron and side skins that have to come out, and some harder to get to solid rivets that the instructions specifically say "don't install these until after this next step" and van's puts those in before the next step. I'm not positive why they installed these. A few of those hard to remove rivets now have oops rivets in there because they were so difficult to remove from the factory.

Quickbuild quality

...the quality of the sheet metal work that has been seen in the last 6-12 months for the quickbuild kits.
If you have had a kit delivered or seen one recently, would you please respond to the poll?

Click to expand...

Perhaps it would help if you expanded the poll beyond one year?

2 things ...that can be better ...

Hello

I have seen many QB's and I build my SB RV-7A.

Three things that can be better on the QB's:
- Fuel tank sealant application, the rivet heads are not covered, leads to tank blisters. The last RV-14 kit that I have seen is don now much better and the shop heads are covered. I hope this is the standard from now on.

- Primer application, primer is not applyied as a "wet, closed layer", it is only sparingly primed, not even the color of the primer is visible. This is only half of the story. The problem out of this ism that sweat and skin salt starts corrosion on QB parts. This not only here and there a bit ... much more. On some places you can see the hand/finger prints, with corrosion started allready. They should wear long sleves during the build and packaging.

- A few small building errors by skin overlaps (RV-7), that get not corrects.

- Also all the riveting is a bit on the lower than nominal to nominal shop head size.

But overall, you will save soo much time for you, your family! If you have a normal job, a wife or girlfriend or even family ... go for QB and enjoy much earlyer your airplane in the AIR!!! It is worth, even if it is not absolut perfect.

What is a tank blister? Are you saying the tank might leak.?

Have a look here ... but carefull an old thread, started in 2006 but still actual.

https://vansairforce.net/community/showthread.php?t=10187&highlight=blister

"The sealant let fuel vapor and some fuel ingredients diffuse thru the rivet connection, this after years. Mostly on the top half of the fuel tank after 3-5 years visible. It forms a small bubble around the rivet. You can not fix this from the outside. You need to fix it from the inside with covering the shop/rivet head with sealant."

To overcome this, the distance the fuel/ingredients have to travel, must be maximized. This is done with simple covering the shop head.

It is not a VANS, but it shows the right graphics: https://sling4familyproject.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/proseal-fun-1/ scroll a bit down and you will see what I mean.