Section: 22
Hours: 4

The weather turned rainy and cold so I decided to do some riveting in the warmth of the garage today. I started with the small aileron parts. I was able to reach all the rivets with the squeezer today. It's always satisfying to see the pieces go together after all the hours of filing, polishing, drilling, counter sinking, dimpling and priming. All these parts come in a left and right configuration so you have to pay attention while assembling.

 I didn't put in enough clecos before starting the riveting on one of these and it warped after a couple rivets.  The doubler/hinge point material is much thicker than the rib but the shop head is on the rib side due to the countersinking so the rib wants to warp when you squeeze the rivet. I drilled out the last rivet, flattened the rib in the dimpler with flush dies and then added more clecos before finishing the rivets. It might have been better to start with the AD3 nut plate rivets at the top and then do the heavier AD4 rivets.

After cross referencing with the packing list I found the hardware for attaching the ribs to the stainless steel tubing counter weights. It is a little tricky tightening down this hardware- I found a right angle philips head in my tool kit which saved the day. I left the screws a little loose. I plan to torque them down after attaching the ribs to the spar to make sure everything aligns properly.

I leave the blue protective covering on the skins until either I prime or rivet. I leave it on for dimpling which eliminates the scratching problem from moving the skins around the dimpling die. Stripping the blue plastic protective coating from the rivet lines always takes longer than I think it should. I'm going to have to find a hotter soldering iron so I can move faster. All the aileron skins are ready to flush rivet the ribs.  I loaded up the first skin with rivets and taped them down with rivet tape. I'm all ready to pound out a serious number of rivets next building session. These skins take AD3-3's which are the smallest rivets I've used so far in the construction. The empennage skins used AD3-3.5's.

Section: 17
Hours: 8

I spent the whole day washing, acid etching and priming the wing outboard leading edge ribs, stiffeners, brackets and skins. I had some problems with water in the air line today- it's been more humid lately and I forgot to drain my air compressor before starting to paint :-(

Section: 17
Hours: 5

I spent the afternoon getting the outboard leading edge skins, ribs and stiffeners ready for priming. I deburred holes and dimpled the skins and stiffeners. I used the Cleveland C-Frame to dimple the holes close to the nose of the skins because the DRDT-2 dimpler would not fit. It was a lot of dimpling, but I paced myself and stayed on task - no extra holes were punched by accident today.

Section: 17
Hours: 5

I assembled the left and right outboard wing leading edge sections in the cradles, clecoed the ribs in place, cut the stiffener to length and match drilled it to the wing skins. I also match drilled holes in the inboard flange tab of the ribs to match the skins.

 I used my micrometer to scribe a line 5/16" (0.3125") from the edge of the stiffener to aid in alignment in the wing. The scribe line does not cut into the aluminum, only the plastic protective sheet.

Here's my onsite inspector, Woodie, doing inspection and quality control.

I also cut the slot for the stall warning vane. The dremel cutoff wheel worked well.

Section:
Hours: 8

I continued adding build log entries today and I'm almost caught up. I'm still refining the format of the site and I need to go back and proof read everything, but I can do that in the future when I have project downtime (or would just rather be sitting at the computer ;-).

LOL- I added so many entries in the last 2 days that the Blogger software started accusing me of being a robot! I had to fill in Captcha challenges multiple times to add the last couple posts today.

Section:
Hours: 9

I FINALLY established this construction log. From the beginning of the project I've been marking up the construction manual pages with notes and dates of completion. I've also been taking numerous photos with my iPhone of work completed or in progress to document construction technique and quality. Today I pulled these sources together and created "Smash's RV-14 Build". I wish I had started it earlier- there are a lot of entries to create and I was only able to post entries up to mid October before calling it a day.

I searched for some time for an appropriate set of software for generating the log. I actually experimented with a Wordpress blog for awhile but was not happy with it. Then I noticed that several builders were using Blogger. I already had a Google+ account so I was somewhat familiar with the Google tools approach to building sites and it wasn't too hard to get going with Blogger. So far I'm happy with it, but time will tell...

Section: 17
Hours: 5

I separated the connector strip from the wing tank skins using the cutoff wheel on my Dremel tool. I  then filed and polished the edges of the 4 wing leading edge skins. The landing light ports were fairly jagged but cleaned up nicely with the die grinder / scotch brite wheel.

Gas cap hole polished and deburred.

 Landing light port smoothed and polished.

Tank connector strips cleaned up, final drilled and dimpled for #8 screws.

 Left LE wing skin mounted in cradles ready for next step.