Ron's RV7 Aircraft Factory


Welcome to my personal blog. This site was created as an informal description of my build progress in the construction of a Van's RV7 aircraft. A place where family/friends/builders/curiosity seekers can follow along. It is not intended to be a detailed description of every step in the building process as that would be much too time consuming. There are plenty of sites that do a great job in that arena, that is not my intention with this site. My intention is for this to be a philisophical/motivational/inspirational account of the emotional ups and downs of the life changing journey...and it will change your life. I hope this will give you an idea, through my eyes, of what its like to make this transformation. A note to other builders, I am not an expert so do not put your safety at risk by attempting anything you see on this site until you have done your own research, or send me an email so we can discuss it. Any deviations from the plans are not approved, nor endorsed by Van's Aircraft or myself. Thanks for visiting.



Monday, November 8, 2010

Ready to Roll! HOBBS 370.0 hrs

Finished up the right aileron this weekend, as I suspected, it went much quicker than the first one. So, now my airplane is ready to roll! :) For anyone reading that is unfamiliar with aircraft design, the ailerons are control surfaces attached to the wing that, when actuated by the control stick, cause the airplane to roll about its longtitudinal axis. See the aileron wikipedia link for more detail.

Had a rather unexpected visit from one of my cousin's on sunday. He was coming through Denver and had a lengthy layover at DIA so I picked him up and we spent the afternoon tossing back a couple cold ones and talking about the old times. He and I used to tear it up pretty good when we were younger men. :)


My order of misc hardware showed up on friday from Van's...did a quick inventory, everything present and accounted for. This included my extra nut plates and some misc AN833 fittings (blue) for the ER tanks. I will still need another order to complete the ER tanks but this will get me started.


Here is what the aileron looks like before closing it up. The bottom side (visible) has CS blind rivets and the top side uses -426 rivets. So, you have to reach your hand and bucking bar into the enclosure to buck the -426 rivets and then the last step being to close it up with the blind rivets. Its really not all that bad if you just take it nice and slow and having a small tungsten bucking bar certainly is desirable. I did this completely solo as well, a helping hand might be nice if you have it, but its definitely possible to do it alone.



On a previous post I showed an 'after' picture of the trailing edge...and forgot to post a 'before' picture. So here ya go, this is what the trailing edge looked like before I tweaked it. You can see how the edge is rounded and falls away from the straight edge. Thats not desirable and is why we tweak it to straighten it up.

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