After nearly a year of collecting dust, my -7A is finally back under construction. Thought i'd update VAF with the intentions of staying involved to keep motivated.
I took a few weeks off work over the holidays with the intention of building as much as possible. As I'm sure you all know, Christmas and family obligations ate a few days of building. But I was able to spend almost 10 days truckin along in the garage. And it feels great!
First step was to clean up the shop. Turns out a year of dust isn't too bad. It's figuring out what I needed to start working on took a while. I decided to start on something new, so I built some wing jigs out of cut off 4x4s and braced them (I didn't want to attach to the top) and so I needed to really make some space. Turned out pretty nice:
I remembered being extremely frustrated with the trim tab bends and elevator tab bends. For some reason bending aluminum is something I'm nearly incapable of. A few hours reading a bunch of VAF posts and looking at other builders logs, I came to the realization that I'm far from alone in this. Looks like many people have cut the tabs clean off. Feeling much better about my ugly cut off tabs on the elevator I cleaned those up and riveted the elevator. And thanks to my dad who is great at bending those tabs, I have a nice trim tab too.
The nicely bent tabs and how i riveted it together:
I also wrestled with rolling the leading edges of my elevators. The steel horn makes rolling the edge a real pain in the ***. I cut my rolling pipe in bits so I could roll each section without hitting the horn. We'll see how that goes -- I didn't quite get to finish this yet. For some reason (ie i misdrilled) the geometry on my trim tab hinge won't allow me to mount the tab in perfect alignment of the elevator's trailing edge. I have a replacement hinge clamped in place ready to be drilled. I will then need to learn how to attach and safety wire the hinge, and that's that!
Most of the rest of my time has been spent working on the wings. Nutplates, nutplates, and more nutplates. I'm getting the sense that everything about the wings will be a bit repetitve. I just put in an order for duckworks lights, the safe air 1 kit, and a bunch of other things.
jig:
and with the spars (look at that nice clean shop!):
The plane is back on track. I'm sure i'll be on VAF a whole lot more now!
I took a few weeks off work over the holidays with the intention of building as much as possible. As I'm sure you all know, Christmas and family obligations ate a few days of building. But I was able to spend almost 10 days truckin along in the garage. And it feels great!
First step was to clean up the shop. Turns out a year of dust isn't too bad. It's figuring out what I needed to start working on took a while. I decided to start on something new, so I built some wing jigs out of cut off 4x4s and braced them (I didn't want to attach to the top) and so I needed to really make some space. Turned out pretty nice:
I remembered being extremely frustrated with the trim tab bends and elevator tab bends. For some reason bending aluminum is something I'm nearly incapable of. A few hours reading a bunch of VAF posts and looking at other builders logs, I came to the realization that I'm far from alone in this. Looks like many people have cut the tabs clean off. Feeling much better about my ugly cut off tabs on the elevator I cleaned those up and riveted the elevator. And thanks to my dad who is great at bending those tabs, I have a nice trim tab too.
The nicely bent tabs and how i riveted it together:
I also wrestled with rolling the leading edges of my elevators. The steel horn makes rolling the edge a real pain in the ***. I cut my rolling pipe in bits so I could roll each section without hitting the horn. We'll see how that goes -- I didn't quite get to finish this yet. For some reason (ie i misdrilled) the geometry on my trim tab hinge won't allow me to mount the tab in perfect alignment of the elevator's trailing edge. I have a replacement hinge clamped in place ready to be drilled. I will then need to learn how to attach and safety wire the hinge, and that's that!
Most of the rest of my time has been spent working on the wings. Nutplates, nutplates, and more nutplates. I'm getting the sense that everything about the wings will be a bit repetitve. I just put in an order for duckworks lights, the safe air 1 kit, and a bunch of other things.
jig:
and with the spars (look at that nice clean shop!):
The plane is back on track. I'm sure i'll be on VAF a whole lot more now!
