I wasn’t going to post anything today because I did not work directly on the RV-10 kit but I figured what the heck, I did work a bit on Practice Kit 1.
I managed to spend an hour in the workshop “almost” finishing off the smallest of my practice kits. Even though I spent a weekend at the EAA / Sportair workshop I am so glad I bought all these practice kits. Just yesterday, doing the dimpling and machine countersinking, I had to re-read the (bare) instructions more than once. It did not help that the instructions seem to have an error on them, nevertheless, I did the dimpling and the countersinking.
I had bought the EAA metal kit building DVD a while back and was watching it again recently. Somewhere in my reviews I remember reading that if you use too much pressure riveting you end up with a wavy “seam”. I also discovered too much pressure with the dimpler will do that.
The second thing that came home, which I did not notice at the workshop, was that if your work piece is not really stabilized, you can easily countersink deeper than you think.
As I was being careful, I don’t think the issues with the practice kit, had I done the same with the real kit, would have been significant, but I am glad I had the opportunity to revisit with the practice kit and not my airplane.
I don’t expect to be able to build an award winner, but I sure am going to do my best to reach somewhere close to that level.
I am not going to time anything that isn’t directly related to the build, but I do want to keep a complete log of the process. Practice kit 1 is almost complete. I will post pics of both sides once I have finished. Maybe I’ll put a small survey up so individuals can grade my work 🙂
