Brief Description: Match Drilling the Vertical Stab Skin
This phase was both rewarding, yet nerve racking! The skins are expensive and probability of making a mistake is very high! This is the part where you really start thinking you should have built an RV-7 or 8 with pre-punched skins. You have to develope a plan to drill blindly through the skin and hit the rib and spar flanges. Your tolerance for error is about is about +-020. One or two off center .... you can correct and recover....get 10 or 15 off center and you will be scraping parts and waisting a ton of time! Van's calls for 1.25' revet spacing.
1. Center line all of the flangs with blue sharpie.
2. I used a metal yard stick to mesure up from the base of the fixture. I marked the stick and the fixture so I could set it back in place and mark the skin. 3. Drill the first holes at the rib/spar intersections. verify that they hit center. 4. Draw a line between the holes and lay out the pattern. Start drilling, go slow, check the back side every three or four holes or so to make sure you have not wondered off course.
