June 17, 2020
The side stiffeners that run under the top forward skin are shipped with the quick build kit with two half round aluminum pieces that hold them in place. These aren’t mentioned anywhere in the plans, so we assumed they were jigs to hold the stiffeners in the correct location. After drilling the skin to the stiffeners, the edge distance of a few of the holes came out really bad. Apparently, the half round pieces are ornamental only and should be removed before any work is done on the top skin.
The only way to fix them properly would be to drill out the 50 or so factory installed rivets and replace the entire stiffener. A call to Van’s told us not to worry about it and that we should dimple and install as is and press on. Only the forward 1-2 holes were really bad on edge distance, and since the stiffener gets most of its strength from the skin, these last 2 didn’t seem to bother the tech support at Van’s at all.
Moving on from that fiasco, I started drilling dimpling and deburring all the holes in the floor. We agreed not to rivet the floors down to better allow future inspections and possible changes. That meant we had to install nut plates for every pre-drilled hole (there’s well over 100 by the way). I didn’t finish, but I made decent progress on getting the floor done.
Before calling it a day, Paul installed the AN caps on the left fuel tank and rubber banded a glove to the vent line. We pumped it up, noted the temperature, and went to bed for the night. We’ll do the soapy bubble inspection tomorrow if the glove is still inflated when it warms up again.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Time: 315.3 hrs)