Chipping away at it...

I've been chipping away at the job of getting the left wing skinned an hour or so at a time. Most of last weekend was taken up with outdoor recreation, so airplane work has been relegated to evenings after work.

Wait! Outdoor recreation?? Isn't it bitter cold in Ohio? Well, yes it is. Luckily, I've gotten pretty tolerant of the cold temperatures from having spent so many hours in the frigid hangar. Sunday dawned sunny and clear, but the morning temperature was 11F and forecast to do no better then 18F. That certainly wasn't the weather that I had been hoping for when I had scheduled my activity a couple of weeks ago, but I'd been looking forward to it anxiously for so long that postponement wasn't even a consideration. So what was this exciting thing that I was going to do? Well, I thought that I'd be trying trap shooting, something I've wanted to try forever. I had a borrowed 12 gauge Remington over/under, a box of 100 shells, and the ability to dress for and tolerate the cold weather. It was on!!

So why "thought?" What happened? It seems I didn't ask enough questions so fully understand what we were going to do. We were actually going out for a couple of rounds of "sporting clays." Me, I had never heard of it. Just in case you haven't either, here's what Wiki knows about it:

Sporting clays is a form of clay pigeon shooting, often described as "golf with a shotgun" because a typical course includes from 10 to 15 different shooting stations laid out over natural terrain. For safety, the course size is often no smaller than 35 acres.

Unlike trap and skeet, which are games of repeatable target presentations, sporting clays simulates the unpredictability of live-quarry shooting, offering a great variety of trajectories, angles, speeds, elevations, distances, and target sizes.

A typical course consists of 10 to 15 stations, with each station presenting targets from trap machines. Usually 5 to 10 targets are shot at each station by a squad of up to six shooters for a total outing of 50 to 100 targets per person. Targets are thrown as singles and pairs. A pair of targets may be thrown as a true pair (or sim pair, i.e., thrown at the same time), as a following pair (thrown sequentially), or on report (the second clay launched on the report of the shooter’s gun).

Numerous hunting conditions can be simulated by combining various speeds and angles with different types of clay targets. Each station is unique. Throughout a course, the shooters might see targets crossing from either side, coming inward, going outward, flying straight up, rolling on the ground, arcing high in the air, or thrown from towers. The possible target presentations are limited only by safety considerations, the terrain, and the imagination of the course designer. The configuration of the stations is often changed to maintain interest for the shooters and for environmental preservation of the course.

Yeah, well, wiki isn't known for its stimulating writing style. It was far more fun than that dry description makes it sound. Still, I like the "golf with a shotgun" description; I've always thought that was the way the game should be played.

"Waggle that driver a tenth time, punk. Make my day...."

Yeah, that's the way golf should be. But it isn't, so they invented sporting clays. Whereas golf has famously been described as a "good walk ruined," sporting clays is a good walk punctuated with the opportunity to shoot at stuff. With a shotgun! I enjoyed it immensely, but I have to tell you one important thing about it: it's HARD. It probably isn't the best thing to start with if you've never fired a shotgun before.

The problem is that, unlike target shooting with a rifle, you can't tell where you missed. All you know is that the little clay pigeon blithely kept flying. You can't tell if your aim was off, if you didn't lead the target enough, or if you led it too much. You just don't know. I only managed to hit 10 out of 50 on my first round. I think before I try it again I will have to spend some time shooting at a fixed target in order to ensure that I'm at least pointing the gun at the location I think I'm pointing it. I tried to talk one of the guys into holding up a target for me, but surprisingly none of them were willing to help out.

With that having taken up most of the weekend, the RV-12 was left sitting until I got back to the paying job and had a few free hours in the evenings. I managed to get the flaperon hinge brackets riveted in using the LP4-3 rivets (they still seem a little short), but that took an entire work session. The location of some of the holes was horrid. I also sprayed a little corrosion protection on them; they will be inaccessible for inspection and/or repair once the skins are on. The RV-12 wings are insanely short of inspection ports. The only one is on the left wing and it's only there to allow access to the stall warning switch.

The next couple of nights were filled with installing the top skins. That was more or less straightforward, although getting the molded stiffener to fit down into the slot of the ribs without assistance requires a bit of finesse and patience, two qualities that I often find distinctly lacking in my repertoire.

Glittens: they work for shooting sporting clays and shooting rivets:

Little blocks of wood hold the leading edge skins up so the top skins can slide in underneath.

Getting the stiffener into the slots is probably frustratingly difficult even when you've had a good day at work.

I hadn't.

Finally in the slot!

Temps in the 30's feel almost balmy to me now:

Balmy or not, those rivets will have to wait until next time.

Three Little Kittens Lost Their Glittens...

Wait. Glittens?

Well, yes.

In another of those instances where I have an idea for something that needs to be invented, only to find that it already has been, I ran across a pair of glittens at Walmart this morning.

The idea came to me a few days ago when I was out in the hangar riveting on the final bottom skin on the left wing. I was fairly comfortable in the 28F degree weather with the notable exception of my fingers, where I had cut the tips off of my gloves to provide better dexterity when working with little things like rivets. I figured that I needed to invent a pair of gloves with removable finger tips so I could have the best of both worlds.

As it turns out, it has already been done. Someone has combined the mitten with the glove, to create what I am calling the "glitten." It's a wild and crazy idea, almost as crazy as, say, combining an apple with a grape.

The wing had been flipped over on Friday night and was thus ready to have the leading edge of the skins folded back onto the top of the wing and riveted. I initially was under the impression that I would be riveting the skins in their entirety, but I quickly noticed that the notch in the ribs that will fit with the stiffened edge molded into the top skins would be covered if I did so.

The sent me scurrying back to the plans in an irrational panic that I had somehow managed to get the bottom skins installed so incorrectly that they were reaching too far over the top of the wing, an idea that I understood was clearly preposterous after just a couple of seconds of contemplation. A closer look at the plans showed where I had gone wrong: only the first few rows of rivets were to be installed.

But before I could do that, I had to get the skins wrapped around to the top of the wing and clecoed down. That was a bit of a battle, but persistent and tenacious pushing, shoving, and clecoing got it locked into place. I then grabbed the Sharpie(tm) and marked the areas to be riveted. Incorrectly, as it transpired. The big left parenthesis looking mark should start one more hole to the right.

Some of the clecos went in with more than a little difficulty, lubricated only by copious application of low-order (high-order words like F-bombs and the similar being reserved for really serious situations such as mis-cutting something or creasing a wing skin while trying to get it into the car) swear words. Given the difficulty of some of them, I thought it prudent to take a look under the hood to make sure that all of the clecos had caught rib flange rather than simply pushing the flange out of the way. That happened once before when I was putting the skins on the horizontal stabilator.

In all of the excitement, and likely distracted and intimidated by my vociferous application of off-color language, my photographer apparently forgot my standing order to never photograph my bald(ing) spot. There'll be hell to pay for that!

Once the skins were in place, the riveting was easy. Then those flaperon hinge thingys that I put together a couple of weeks ago needed to be retrieved from wherever it was that I had put them so I couldn't lose them and installed.

First, the little triangular bracket gets riveted to the bottom skin.

Then the actual assembly gets slid up through a slot in the wing to fit between the bracket and the wing rib. It's a very tight fit and the first one did not go easily at all. In fact, it took a lot more pushing, shoving, and swearing to get it in there. The second was a lot easier because I smeared a little Boelube on the part first, rather than depending on shouted invectives to provide lubrication.

It's hard to see, but the hinge mount thingy is sandwiched in there. It's still clecoed because I found it hard to believe that the normal LP4-3 blind rivets would be used to attach a part that thick; it seems to me that a longer rivet would be more appropriate. I decided to wait until after I had gotten home and researched it a little bit before using the shorter rivets. I have been unable to find anything that says that the shorter rivets aren't used there, so next time I'm out there I'll finish the job.

For now, here's the wing just about ready for the final sealing that will come when I add the top skins.