Van's RV-9A in Aurora

The Big Picture

The Big Picture
Flying! 8/28/2011

Sunday, March 9, 2008

3.3 hours, 25 pop rivets since last post.

Successfully reduced progress to a crawl. Felt miserable all week, so no progress after work during the week.

Saturday
Drilled out the 3 rivets set the previous night. Rerolled top and middle sections, using progressively smaller dowels until it was fitting right. Also used the hand seamer to crimp the outside skin over so that it would pull down tight during riveting. After about an hour of fussing, finally happy with the result. After the intial bend is done with two people, subsequent bending is easy enough to do with one person. Pop riveted leading edge.


On the the trailing edge.
Mixed up the proseal. At first, I tried to mix about a third of the proseal into baggie. This was an utter failure. Judging the amount needed to do the trailing edge, even the 3.5 oz cartridge from Van's is way more than needed. So I tried to use a smaller amount and save the rest for the elevators/trim tab. If you haven't messed with proseal, well you just have to see it for yourself. It's like the evil ooze from a science fiction movie. It's super viscous, super sticky, and super heavy. And it smells like a monkey cage.
I squeezed the base into the baggie, and then the hardener. And then tried to mix the two. That lasted about a minute before being abandoned. This stuff is so thick that the baggie and the mixing stick were basically glued togther instantly. Stirring more aggressively would definitely rip the baggie (and I used the super duty freezer bag). It's clear you want this stuff touching as few things as possible. So I just mixed up the rest of the batch in the cartridge and attached the nozzle. But then the next problem was pushing the ooze out of the cartridge. I used a short piece of scrap, but that was too hard and impossibly slow. So I screwed a 3x3 board on the end of the pusher scrap and braced that against my stomach and chest. This worked, but I have bruises. Lesson learned, just buy the cartridge gun.

After fighting with the proseal, finally applied to trailing edge, trailing edge wedge, and big dabs on each stiffener end for good luck. Wrestled the wedge into the trailing edge, and clecoed to the angle. The clecoes are not nearly strong enough to really press the proseal down. Then spent 30 minutes cleaning up the evil ooze. One builder had the trick of using scads of small bits of shop towel for cleanup. This is definitely the way to go. MEK also seems to clean it off when not yet dry.

Friday
Since Granger and Katrin were around, we rolled leading edge of rudder. Used a 1 1/4" closet rod as described earlier. Set 3 rivets in the top most section. But not happy with the results.