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Service Bulletin 14-01-31 (4)

This entry was posted in Empennage Horizontal Stab on by

Lots of time in the hangar, without a ton to show for it. Today was challenging.

First I set about cleaning up a small nick I had placed in the spar. The drill had slipped during drilling of the rivets, and I wanted to clean up that surface. Unfortunately it was in a difficult position on the corner of the web and flange. I had to remove additional skin rivets and then slowly sand the area down. This was very slow going with limited space to maneuver. You can see the end polished result below.  

I also made the relief notches. Here you can see the start. The red lines mark the width and depth of the notch. 

You can see a completed notch at the bottom of this photo next to the first spar corner I removed. The process here is to wedge the stainless steel between the spar and the skin and then use a dremel to make the cut. Still space is difficult and getting a perfectly clean line is difficult.

I used a two by four to wedge the skin open to help file the rough edges and round the corners. Very slow going as my hands and arms don’t contort the right way and space was very limited.

Here’s a good picture of a completed relief notch and spar modification. Of note, the RV-7 plans explicitly call out the relief notch, whereas there is not mention of the relief notching the RV-8 plans (diagrams or instructions). 

Site Update

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by

My apologies to anyone who may have been trying to access my site over the past few days. I realized that the old site was not completely responsive on mobile, so I wanted to update it accordingly. In the process I became distracted and decided to completely redo the look and format. The organization of the site remains the same, but there have been several improvements. The site is now completely responsive and displays beautifully on tablets and mobile devices. Furthermore, I made a static home page with snippets of recent posts.

If you check out the media page you will see I now have gallery viewers for both Vimeo and YouTube channels. The photos are gone. There are just too many to keep up with. When N9FX flies, I’ll go back and make a slideshow of the best photos along the way. Until then… no more photos on the media page.

Additionally, you will notice that photos now pop out instead of linking to a image source page. This looks great on a desktop, but I’m always a little leary of this feature on mobile devices. It works ok on my iOS device, but I’ve not tested on anything other than the iPhone 6 screen size.

Also, I added a page for an Amazon a-store. I’ve added every item I’ve bought for the RV project to the list of items on that page. If I didn’t buy it, I didn’t put it on there. If you have questions about anything, such as why I bought a particular product, let me know.

I also made several behind the scenes tweaks. I divided the function for totaling hours between the three categories of build, flying, and maintenance. (Previously while three were shown, I was only calculating one). I also customized the input panel to streamline it for my RV build. I also created a child theme and linked it to a git repository so that my custom code isn’t over-ridden by updates, and so that I can implement some version control. There are several other under the hood changes that I’m sure only I care about. 🙂

All in all, I’m very happy with the new look. One day this site will be more than just my build log, and I want to maintain as much functionality as possible. Cheers – PLB

Service Bulletin 14-01-31 (3)

This entry was posted in Empennage Horizontal Stab on by

Today was the monthly EAA Chapter meeting. So that ate into my plane building time. My goal was to completely remove both angles from the from spar. Unfortunately, this meant dealing with the problem rivets from my previous session. I didn’t take any pictures during removal, but here are several photos from after the fact. The method I used for the trouble rivets was a file and super small drill bits. I filed them down as smooth as I could, and then using a punch and a small drill bit slowly worked the bit back to center. Eventually I was able to get them out. Every single rivet came out without having to enlarge the holes in the spar.

One hole in one angle is slightly enlarged. The following two photos are provided as a comparison for the slightly enlarged hole. The first photo has a 1/8″ punch inserted in a hole without any expansion.

The second has the same 1/8″ punch inserted in the slightly expanded hole. I’m undecided what to do about this.


A slight deformation from removing the last rivet in the spar on the bottom. Nothing to worry about.

Here are the two trouble rivets. The hole is not oblong all the way through, but the top looks a little nasty. I’m considering replacing this angle.

Here are both of the angles from above. The zoomed in photos above may make the problems look worse than they are.