Electric work on the shop today

One of my clients is an electrician and he’s coming by today to do some work on the shop. Before I put up drywall on the far wall, I wanted to get some outlets installed over there. Also, he is going to run a dedicated circuit to those outlets, install some switches and hang a few shop lights.

My folks are coming through town tonight, and Dad said he would bring down the propane heater that he has in his hangar so I can heat the shop with it. Aren’t Dads great?

Rudder ready to prime!

I had a little help from Isaiah – in the form of trying to drive his tricycle over the rudder skins – and now nearly all the rudder components are ready to prime and assemble. The only remaining thing to do is to countersink both sides of the trailing edge piece. I will use a trailing edge piece from an elevator underneath the piece to keep it perpendicular to the countersink bit while on the drill press.

More on the Rudder

I final-drilled all of the rudder and disassembled it per the plans. Unfortunately, there were a couple of places where the clecoes must have been rubbing against something while we moved, and that left some small deformations around those particular holes. It’s nothing major, just an annoyance. I’m building an airplane and every rivet doesn’t need to be perfect.

I used the edge roller from Avery Tools to put a slight inward bend on the trailing edges of both rudder skins. This will help the skins to sit down tight when the trailing edge is riveted.

Another few hours of deburring, cleaning and priming and it should be time to rivet the rudder together. Then I will get a chance to try out my new back-rivet plate (a 4-foot piece of cold-rolled steel I picked up from a local steel supplier).

It’s not spectacular, but you can see the photo below of the workshop.  I took the picture with my iPhone using “Pano”, and app that takes multiple pictures and merges them together to form a panoramic photo.  The ceiling looks like it’s bent, but that’s just an illusion from the merging of the photos.  As you can see, the shop is cozy, but it works!