[RVG8tor]

Well I was looking at Mickey's site and saw an issue he had attaching his HS and not having edge distance on the angle at the F810 bulkhead. http://www.rv8.ch/article.php?story=2004031620072395 Since I am about to drill my HS stab on I thought I would take a look at mine and sure enough, one side is great but the other is off by 1/8" or so, it is tough to measure. You can see the difference in the photo. I called Van's builder support and even though the critical part is to have the bolt centered on the longeron, Ken thought it would not be too much work to drill off the aft deck and replace this angle, so I guess I have some rivets to drill out!

I wanted to post here because Mickey's site gave me a heads up, not sure if there are others out there with this issue. I could just try to drill out the angle only but the manufactured heads are not very visible for drilling and I don't think I want to try drilling out from the tail side of the rivet. Although I think I could reset the rivets easy enough through opening I have. I will have to think that one over. Ken's advice was to just take the aft deck off, sometimes what seems like the long route actually is the better way to go.

Any one with experience or advice please chime in. My plan is to clamp a brace across the longerons forward of the aft deck to hold things in alignment; fuselage has only 0.1 degree difference (twist) between the front and aft end and I don't want to mess that up Then I will drill out the aft deck, custom mill the angle to this opening and then reinstall everything.

This is looking from the bottom up towards the aft deck. This is what it should look like. The other photo shows the gap I have.


Ken did apologize about this but obviously that does not help me now but they will make a note to check this on future kits.

 

[RVG8tor]

New angle installed

Well I thought long and hard on how to approach this. I decided to try and drill out the rivets from the buck tail since this seemed to be better than removing the entire aft deck. After center punching the tails I drilled with a #33 bit about as deep and the rivet tail was tall. I then opened up the hole to #30 and with a punch popped the tails off. Now that I could see the middle of the hole I drilled a little bit more with the #33 bit until I thought I was through most of the angle depth, the rivets still would not pop out even with a light tap on the punch. So I took a #40 bit and kept drilling, this relieved the pressure enough that about the time I was getting to the rivet head they rivets would pop out. I had a couple of holes get ever so slightly enlarged. The ones on top of the aft deck were a piece of cake. When I compared the old angle to the new one, it was definitely ground down too much on one side. I did have to break out the deep yoke, with that I was able to squeeze all the rivets. All is well that ends well. In total I spent 5 hours changing out the part, of course I spent the better part of yesterday and last night pondering what to do about this part.

Sorry for the blurry shot but here is the now one installed.