Oct. 25, 2001 - 3 hours

I started the night by finishing up the HS-610 & HS-614.  I removed them from the HS-602 and made the bend.  I used an angle finder to check the bend.  I don't have a vise but the work mate bench worked just fine.  They were not hard to bend.  I just put the ends between a couple pieces of scrap 1 by's, aligned to the marked bend line and they bent right over.

I now needed to finish the fabrication of the tongues of the HS-602's.  I had read somewhere to be careful about how much of the flange that you took off to insure that you had ample space for the rivet holes (probably from Phil's or Dan's site).  I used tin snips and made the initial cuts, then the standard:  cut, file & finish process.

Time to mate the 610 & 614 back to the 602 and drill the holes in the tongue. 

With this process finished, it's time to disassemble, then the standard: de-burr, dimple, countersink, file & finish process.  These parts are ready to be primed.  I plan on the priming party to start tomorrow.  I need to prime and rivet both the front and rear HS spars.

I had a little more time so I started the process of cleaning up the ribs.  Rounding the edges: cut, file & finish.  I went ahead and fluted a couple of the ribs just to get the hang of it.  Before fluting, I took a tri-square to verify the bends were square with the back of the ribs.  I used the hand seamers to "square" these bends up.  If you wait until after fluting to do this step, the hand seamers will reduce the depth of your flutes and you end up having to re-flute your flutes (:

Oct. 26, 2001 - 7 hours

My son, Chris, came in for the weekend from Iowa State.  I immediately put him to work (: helping me with the HS spars.  I haven't riveted either of the spars.  Tonight we started with my first experience with priming.  I built a paint booth in the corner of the basement but have delayed painting until tonight.  I started by etching and cleaning the spars and reinforcing plates for both of the spars.  I then took an air hose and blew the pieces off to make sure there was no water before starting to prime.  I started by spraying with the pieces laying flat on the table with chicken wire stretched over the top.  This didn't seem to work very well so I hung them from the ceiling with wire.  This definitely didn't work because the spray of the paint would move them.  So I moved them back to the table.  I finally half-way figured out the settings on the gun that seemed to work.

Chris also squared up the channels of the ribs and fluted them to straighten the back of each rib.

After the paint dried, we began riveting by riveting the HS-412 together.  The short squeezer set (1/8 cupped by 1/8th body) that I ordered from Cleaveland tools had arrived and we put it to work. 

We riveted both the HS front spar and the HS rear spar. This completed both of these pieces.   

Seemed like we did a lot more than this but there were a lot of firsts tonight.  It took a while to get everything set up for the first priming operation.  We were also taking out time with the riveting operation, especially at the beginning.  The pneumatic squeezer works great.  Just make sure that you have the stroke set correctly and that you keep it held straight.

Oct. 27, 2001 -  8 hours

We started the morning by attaching the ribs to the rear spar.  This was straight forward.  The plans call out the measurements so just follow the measurements and all will work out.  We also cut out a couple of small strips to use to emulate the skin thickness when attaching the ribs.  (I think if I was doing this part again, I'd check the rib alignment with the skins before drilling.  I've got one inboard rib, HS-605?, that is about 1/16 of an inch outside of the skin edge.  I'm confident that I can pull it in and there is plenty of room for the rivet.  Just cosmetic.)

We deburred the ribs and back to the priming booth.  Today went much better.  I added another light to the spray booth.  This helped a lot.  I knew that I didn't have enough light in this area but had never gotten around to putting it up.  I also turned up the amount of paint that the gun sprayed.  The ribs came out much better. 

After the paint dried, we riveted the ribs to the rear spar.  We then attached the front spar with clamps to the ribs.  We tried to use the skin to align everything.  We hadn't put them in the jig at this point.  I've read that some didn't need the jig at all for the pre-punched kits.  I'm sure that this is true but we couldn't hold everything without building some type of apparatus and things weren't lining up very well.  As the jig and attaching brackets were built, we decided to mount them in the jig. Here's Chris checking the alignment.  After getting things mounted and aligned in the jig, everything fell into place.  Here's the center mount of the jig with the plum bob on center.

We drew lines down the center of all the ribs to use for alignment.  We aligned all the ribs using the skin and the lines we had drawn and clecoed them in place.  Off came the skins and we riveted the ribs in place.  We couldn't use the squeezer on these so we pulled out the rivet gun.  We took out the middle tip ribs to make sure we wouldn't rivet them until after we get the skin finished.

Here is the spars completed riveted together waiting on adding the skins.

This was a very productive weekend.  Having the extra help really made things much easier.  Next step is to get the skins onto the HS.