Comparison of parts ...

Here are a couple of shots of what we did the other evening. We put the skin around the internal structure (ribs and spar) using clecos which are basically pins to hold the skin in place while you are riveting.

The tricky part is going to be riveting the middle rib and spar because you have to reach down through one of the ribs on the end with a tool (bucking bar) while you are using the riveting tool from the outside.

And here is a comparison of our stabilizer and one of a fully-built and flying RV-10. You might have

to click on the image to read the text but the part of the tail that has a rectangle around it is what we have so far. Once we finish the stab (short for stabilizer) we will move on to the rudder next!

One Year Later ...

Fast forward one year from the pictures in the last post ... we (read mostly Andrew) just about finished the shed, there are few more things to do but it's been functional since the spring/summer. Andrew built some workbenches that you can see here in the picture. There's the one in the foreground and then there are two in the background (one is hidden). Andrew added the lights overhead and then another light in the area to the right of the picture (not shown). He also added an air compressor and ran some lines so that we can use it at the benches.

For those that aren't familiar with the process I'll give a quick overview. You can buy airplanes many different ways, all put together and certified, as kits that come in sections (i.e. tail), you can even go to manufacturers and pay them to oversee you while you build the airplane yourself ... you basically pay them to be an employee ... what a gig!

We decided to buy an RV-10 kit plane that will eventually be a four seat aircraft. The benefit of kit planes is that you can buy it piecemeal and not have to buy and store everything at the same time. We bought the tail kit a year ago. When you buy a kit plane, it'll come with step-by-step

instructions. Another thing that is good is that there are other people doing this at the same time and you can use the web to get information from the other builders like issues they had or techniques they used that worked or even ask questions.

When you are starting out you don't want to just jump right in and possibly ruin the real (expensive) pieces of airplane if you make a mistake so you start out on "practice" pieces to try your technique for building such as riveting (putting two pieces of metal together using a pin basically). Here are a couple of shots of the "practice" pieces.

Andrew and I put the last two internal rivets in the vertical portion of the tail this evening (pic to the right). The next step is to put the skin (metal) around the spar and ribs (internal structure or skeleton, see picture above).

Here Andrew is getting ready to paint the inside of the skin to help reduce corrosion. Unfortunately I can't help with that due to the fumes and being pregnant and all.

We'll hopefully start putting the skin on tomorrow night!! And for those not familiar with the inside of airplanes, you'll actually see something that you are more familiar with ... the vertical fin or in airplane speak ... vertical stabilizer. Stay tuned!

Taking delivery of the tail kit ...

It's hard to believe that we ordered and received the first kit of our RV-10 airplane one year ago (Sep 07) !! Here we are pretty happy to get it ... now if only we had room to work on it.

We had to build a shed first to get a lot of the crap out of the garage so that we could set up shop in the garage. Baby steps.