Brief Description: Drilled left elevator ribs, dimpled right elevator
My buddy left for home today so I spent most of my free time in the shop. I finished the drilling of the left elevator and took it apart for deburring. I then moved onto the dimpling of the right elevator parts. I had my buddy use the squeezer and dimple the 703 and 704 ribs yesterday just so he could see how it works. He is interested in building and I am trying to get him hooked! I was going to finish the dimples. The last 3 holes in the 703 rib still needed to be done. I usually get all but the last two with the squeezer on most ribs so I squeezed these holes. To do this you have to force the flanges apart a bit and insert the top part of the yoke and die in between the flanges, then slowly add pressure to the pneumatic squeezer until the other die gets close, then after alignment is confirmed finish the squeeze. Well one side went fine but the other side was not lined up and was just off center so I ended up with an offset hole and some small cracks in the dimple. You can see what I mean in the photo, I took the photo after using the squeezer with the flush set to flatten out the area then making a new dimple centered on the proper hole.
I called Van’s and they said just rivet the hole and to add another hole next to the bad rivet. This is what I did as you can see from the other photo. I don’t want to do work just to make me feel good and I respect the experience at Van’s but I am not sure if one hole is enough, so I have a query into them about whether I should add a second hole on the other side of the bad hole and or adding a doubler strip of aluminum on the inside of the flange to span the old and new holes. I think the design of the kits are such that you can have a single rivet be bad as long as the ones on either side are good. In fact at first Van’s said I could add a rivet between holes if it made me feel better, later in the conversation I asked if I had to add the hole and they said to add the new hole. It will be interesting to see what they have to say with my second query. Th
