Brief Description: Riveted midline brace under aft skin
Today was not a blue ribbon day! We had to fabricate another angle bracket seen in Image 1 and rivet it to the bulkhead. I am not sure what the problem was but we had trouble driving these four rivets and had to drill them out multiple times before finally getting them right. We took the air regulator off the rivet gun thinking this might be a problem and changed the spring holder on the rivet gun then Claude and I changed positions, one bucking and the other riveting. We finally seemed to get it right and I am not sure why. We had had no trouble riveting before today for some time. For one thing bulkhead was not a stable area to rivet and the back side of the bulkhead was hard to get to. When we got to the forward end of the brace, we had no problem with the countersunk rivets as can be seem in Image 2. You will notice in the image the little notes that we leave ourselves so we will not make a mistake. In this instance we are reminding ourselves to dimple the rivet holes in so the rivets would lie flush as you see they do..........We opened up the package containing the TruTrac servos and found that we need to mount the pitch servo to the elevator bell crank that we had installed 2 days ago. So we will do that on Monday. ........ I talked to Jason Smith at Aerotronics and committed to them building my panel. We have ordered a Grand Rapids EFIS today as well as an AOA Sport installation kit. He said that it would take about 2-3 months to get the GRT EFIS in and another 3 months to get the panel wired etc........It finally dawned on me as I was once again reviewing and planning that Van's manual calls for installing the aft top skin and the forward top skin and he meant the "Aft" "Aft" top skiin and the "foreward" aft top skin. I was reading the plans correctly but the manual incorrectly. No harm done but some confusion made worse by the fact that there is no manual for the Quick Build Kit.
Horizontal brace between bulkheads with angle seen
