Van's RV-9A in Aurora

The Big Picture

The Big Picture
Flying! 8/28/2011

Monday, April 13, 2009

2.6 hrs, 98 rivets
Finished back riveting stiffeners to the right aileron skins.
The 98 rivets took 28 minutes, and that included playing with the cat.

The other 2.1 were spent match drilling the bottom skins to the aileron ribs, deburring and dimpling. Mostly dimpling.
First, had to match drill the two inner 3/32 holes from spar to the reinforcement plate. After deburring, clecoed the aileron ribs to spar and match drilled, deburring once again.
Then clecoed bottom skins to the aileron frame, weighted it down like in the pictures in the instructions and match drilled. I'm noticing that the aileron skins don't seem to match the spar hole spacing very well. If you try to cleco the leading edge of the skin to the spar, it ends up buckled. Hmmm.
After deburring, started dimpling the rib. The Avery vice grip dimpler does a fine job but just can't reach the most aft rivet at the narrow part of the rib. This is well documented by various builders and of course I ran into it on the empennage. The pop rivet dimpler is the obvious solution, but it can't be used straight out, the other rib flange get's in the way.
I decide to use a novel approach that I haven't seen documented. So maybe I finally get to contribute something original. Along the way, it fixes a dimension on another jig previously built, that had no other controlling constraint.

Let me explain.

Numerous builders, including Smitty, where I first credited the trick, have used various shims to help with the pop riveting task. I looked at it today, and decided a wedge shaped shim was needed. So I made one from some scrap. And I used the pop rivet offset jig I made a while back to complete the stack. It turned out to have just about the right angle to match the rib angle. With it all assembled, there's a nice square stack for the pop rivet gun to work on, and the dimple dies, and the opposing rib flange are all nicely square and supported.