It could be worse...

Still lacking the missing rib, all I could do on the left wing was move it out of the way so I could start on the right wing. The wing is still very flimsy with the ribs being unsupported on one end and I was worried that they'd get bent while in storage, so I clecoed on the aft spar.

The inboard end of the aft spar has four holes that will eventually be riveted to the matching rib, but the rib only has the same three holes as the rest of the ribs. Two of them align with the top and bottom holes in the hinge brace on the spar; the other two get match drilled.

The wing is still light enough for me to move alone as long as I'm careful to pick it up at a balance point, but I'm still very paranoid about schlepping it around. There's 15' 3" of mayhem that can get caught up against something and cause an unfortunate accident.

Things are really getting tight in the hangar. The wing is still narrow enough that I can fit it into the gap between the sailboat and the RV-6. That won't last forever, though.

With the left wing parked off to the side, I was able to start on the right wing. The ribs get clecoed in in the same way as before.

I'm still a little paranoid over the question as to which side of the spar flange the rib gets placed. You can see that the drawing requires a degree of interpretive effort. The tie-breaker for me was that the drawing shows the holes in the rib to be visible; if the rib was placed on the other side of the flange, the holes wouldn't be visible from the angle shown.

In an odd and inexplicable case of asymmetry, the right wing is structured very differently from the left. On the right wing, seven of the ribs still have their front flange. That flange gets riveted to the spar. It's the same kind of tight fit that gave me so much grief when I was attaching rib flanges to the spar. This close-in riveting requires the use of the wedge thingy, and I was having a problem before with the mandrel of the rivet breaking off in the rivet puller. I went out and bought a new riveter in the hopes that the mandrel breaking problem was a symptom of a worn-out riveter and wouldn't reoccur with a new puller.

The good news: the very first rivet broke off cleanly. The bad news: the very first rivet broke off cleanly and the mandrel got jammed in the new rivet puller. Uh-oh!! I had visions of every single rivet of the next twenty-eight behaving this way!

The next twenty-seven rivets went fine, though. While I still don't like using the wedge thingy and it took a long time to get the rivets in, I figured it could have been worse.

Of course, I can't think "it could be worse" without thinking of this:



But it was done, and as I said, it could have been worse.

How?

Well, I went to check on the next step and saw this note that I swear hadn't been there before:

I had used LP4-3 rivets. On all of them. They'd have to all be drilled out and replaced with LP4-4s.

Now you're probably asking yourself, "How in the world could he have missed that?? Big, bold font and everything. What more could they do? How much more obvious could it be???"

Well, here's how it is. I had Goetta for breakfast again today. It's a little known historical fact (by which I mean that I just made it up) that Hitler had Goetta for breakfast on the morning of the day that he opened an Eastern front by attacking Russia, and we all know how that worked out for him.

Not buying that? Well, I don't blame you. What really happened is that I looked at the right wing as basically the same as the left wing and only glanced at the plans enough to figure out which style of rib went where. It was careless, and I paid for it by having to drill out all of those rivets and replace them with the correct size.

The head of the rivet drills off easily, but because the rivet is too short for the hole, it's tough to get the rest of the rivet out of the hole. It's all swelled up in there, you see. It's like a monkey trap.

monkey trap

[edit]English

[edit]Noun

monkey trap (plural monkey traps)

1. (literally, probably folk-lore) A cage containing a banana with a hole large enough for a
monkey's hand to fit in, but not large enough for a monkey's fist (clutching a banana) to come out.
Used to "catch" monkeys that lack the intellect to let go of the banana and run away.

2. (figuratively) A clever trap of any sort, that owes its success to the ineptitude or gullibility of the victim.

Pay particular attention to definition #2.

Anyway, This tool helps. What I did was take a $5 Harbor Freight center punch and grind down the pin. It works very well for pushing out the remainder of the rivet in cases like this.

Unfortunately I ran out of time or I would have proceeded to rivet the aft spar into place.

It looks like a wing, anyway.

A Christmas standing rib roast

Well, standing ribs, anyway. No roast.  As my annual Winter Sabbatical (also known as "practice retirement") proceeds apace, I'm falling into a nice day-to-day rhythm. No more am I getting up at 5:00 am; today I managed to sleep in until a positively scandalous 6:30 before getting up to start the day. Coffee, first, to savor while getting surfing the web and getting caught up on the news. A little later I make myself a breakfast, usually something just for me and my eclectic tastes. For the last two days it has been Cincinnati Goetta, a tasty German breakfast meat that is one of those things that are better served without looking too deeply into how they're made.

Never heard of it? Here's a tantalizing description shamelessly purloined from a web site:

THIS IS GOETTA.
The patties begin to sizzle. The pin oats swell and pop. The spices throughout the gloriously married pork and beef infuse the atmosphere. And the corners of your brain turn up to a grin. While the crumbles dance in the hot pan, the rounds color to a golden brown, and your tongue puddles with anticipation. The final patty is flipped unveiling a brilliant batch of toasted treasures. The belly roars.

THIS IS GOETTA.
Your fork breaks the delicate crisp and moves carefully through the creamy middle of the morning circle. Every bite sends you deeper into total sensory engagement, and allows the mind to skip through the collection of stories that decorate your family’s history and your own. In a moment you are at your grandma’s counter enveloped in tales of her grandma’s kitchen. Your heart sings.

THIS IS GOETTA.
The pure enjoyment you draw from each tender-crisp forkful testifies to the power of passion. Your delight drives that passion. And the contribution of your experience makes richer the fabric that forms the heritage and legend. This is the end of boring breakfast. This is the return to what matters. The return to what inspires. The return to what is right and good and real and delicious.

THIS IS GOETTA.

Nearly poetic, but very telling in its lack of detail as to the precise ingredients.

"What're the German words for lips and testicles?" he asks, apropos of nothing.

With my luck? Probably "goet" and "ta."

Once fed, I start to think about getting ready to go out to the hangar. By "starting to think," I really mean "starting to watch the thermometer." It's been pretty brisk in the early hours these week and I've found that if I can keep myself occupied with an old B&W movie on TCM for a few hours the temps will catch up with my internal thermostat. Today it was The Devil and Daniel Webster that carried me through the unappealing morning weather.

Once it gets up to about 25F I'm ready to go.

I'm still working my way through preparing the wing ribs. As we've seen before with the parts of this airplane, Van's prefers to make a single part and have us modify ("whittle down" would also be an apt description) sets of parts as necessary. For example, there is only one (well, two if you could "left" and "right" as different parts) type of forward rib, and one type (also with a "left" and a "right" variant) of main rib. Various numbers of each are customized to the demands of their relative location on the wing by means of amputation of various appendages.

I started with the left nose ribs. Some number of them have no need for the back flange, so it is cut off. This is easily accomplished with the band saw, and is yet another argument in favor of not attempting to build an RV-12 without one. I started by placing a straight edge against the top and bottom flanges and using a Sharpie marker to draw a line for me to follow with the saw blade.

The blade cuts straight and true through the thin aluminum quite easily.

A smaller number of the ribs also required the excision of two of the little flanges in the nose area.

After customizing a few dozen ribs, I had a flashback to the fuselage kit: install nutplates! These were a little odd in that they go on the outside of the rib; I had to be careful not to put them on the inside where they would appear to be more normally placed.

The majority of the main ribs also lose their large flange. I think out of twenty-six ribs, something like seven actually got to keep that flange.

A couple of the main ribs, one a lefty and one a righty, get a doubler added to them. Doing so requires a temporary clecoing to the rib and the match drilling of ten holes on each rib.

Four ribs get the longeron hinge brackets installed. The plans only have a drawing to show the orientation of the parts for the "right" ribs.

It took me awhile to mentally transpose the drawing to find the correct placement on the "left" ribs.

In one of those weird non-linear progression moments so prevalent in the order of operations, we then returned to the braces that had been match drilled a few steps prior to finish the job with LP4-3 rivets.

Finally, after hours of preparation it was time to start standing the ribs on the spine spar. In another of those odd dichotomies we're getting used to, the preponderance of main ribs used to attach to the left spar are "right" ribs. Only one "left" rib us used. The first "right" rib goes way out on the very outside end of the spar. I spent a lot of time making sure that I was putting the rib on the correct side of the flange mounted to the spar. It would be a royal pain to fix if I got this wrong!

The next rib is one of those that hosts a flaperon hinge brace. Being all top heavy like that, it wasn't keen on standing up straight with just a few clecos holding it in place.

There's plenty of room between ribs to fit the riveter in there. The rivet holes are far enough away from the spar that the little cheater wedge isn't required. The new riveter worked great!

I had to leave a gap because I'm still missing the loaned out rib. Figures it would be one that I need early in what is sure to be a lengthy process. I hope to retrieve it tomorrow.

The most inboard rib is the one that had a doubler riveted to it. It mounts on the opposite side of its respective spar flange than the rest of the ribs. I won't be able to rivet it in until the missing spar is in place because the gap between these ribs is much tighter than it is on the outboard ribs.