Wow, what a difference [insert appropriate temporal period here] makes!

It's a trite expression. I'm so tired of hearing it that I actually cringe whenever someone says it. Actually, I think I've moved beyond 'cringe' and now grind my teeth. All of that having been said....

Wow, what a difference a day makes!

Yesterday I enjoyed temperatures in the high 50's accompanied by a light breeze and soft blue skies by shooting a round of sporting clays in the morning and working on the RV-12 wing in the afternoon. The shooting didn't go nearly as well as it did my last time out. You may remember that I had a brand new ("to me," as the impecunious like to say) shotgun last time out, and scored a 22 out of 50 with it. This time around I shot 9. The message here is clear: I need to buy a new shotgun every two weeks.

This morning I drove to work in a Mitty-esque drama that was something akin to flying a B-17 through thirty miles of flak to deliver a load of bombs to the oil fields of New Albany, Ohio. Well, minus the abject, visceral terror of getting blown out of the sky, anyway. With the flashes of lightening in the night sky playing the visual role of flak bursts and the violent slaps against the side of the car from the gusty winds, it was easy to slip into the role of Squadron Commander Dave.

Or it would have been if I wasn't drenched; having failed to buy gas the day before when the weather was nice, I was forced to stop before making the long trek to work. As I stepped out of the car, there was just a light drizzle. Just as I started pumping gas, though, the clouds broken open with a deluge and the winds behind it forced it horizontally under the roof over the pumps. Fortunately I was there to block most of it or the pump might have gotten wet. And what a shame that would have been!

Still, as I was battling my way north with the winds pounding against the flanks of the car and the deep puddles on the highway trying to wrest control of the steering wheel from my white-knuckled hands, I was able to think a few positive thoughts about the pouring rain:

- I had picked a great weekend to replace my worn wiper blades with a pair of brand new (really brand new, not "to me" brand new) Rain-X Latitudes. I had AutoZone install them on my car, but also bought a pair to take home for the wife's car. I couldn't figure out how to get the old ones off and the included instructions offer no assistance on that topic, so I offered Egg the opportunity to take the car back up to AutoZone and get some help. Where's the opportunity for her in that? Well, anytime you can mock your daddy for his ineptitude, well.... kids love that!

- It wasn't snowing.

- It was washing the accumulated salt off of my car - another thing I had failed to do over the weekend.

- It's Monday and I would only be inconvenienced while driving to work as opposed to a rainy weekend day when the whole day would be a write-off.

That's as far as I got with happy thoughts before I caught up with a truck and added temporary road blindness to my list of woes. Man, do those things ever throw up a bow wave!

It was a productive weekend by any measure. On the topic of the RV-12 (oh, and let me now say "Welcome" to those of you that are well versed enough with my preliminary ramblings to just scroll down to the first picture), I was able to get to the point where all that is left to do is to seal the wingtip. I would have gone ahead and done that, but I ran into a situation that I wanted to spend some time thinking about first. We'll get to that in a minute.

First, I found a better way to break the irritatingly-dimpled edge of the wing walk doubler. I'm a huge fan of the converted visegrip edge breaking tool, but it simply wouldn't work with those dimples in the way. The original edge breaking tool that I bought (and hated when trying to break the edges on the tail cone) worked much better.

Riveting the doubler, just like everything else about this wing, seemed easier this time around. I still had to do a Mitty-esque farm veterinarian thing to get the ribs lined up correctly, though. Mooo!

So, there's the right wing mostly done.

The hangar is getting mighty crowded. I've all but decided that it's time to start the more-than-likely lengthy process of selling the RV-6. I need the space. It's due for annual inspection in March and I hate to spring the $$$s (and working hours) for that when a pre-buy inspection is likely to be right around the corner. As much sense as it makes to get busy with selling it, it's still a horribly difficult decision. I'll sure miss it when it's gone!

I started on the wing tip. This too went much more easily the second time around.

Until, that is, I was getting ready to close out the wing tip and noticed that I had forgotten to run a length of fishing line through the wire bushings in the ribs. The fishing line would someday be used to pull through electrical wires for navigation, strobe, and landing lights if I were ever to decide to install a lighting kit. I have no plans to do so at this point, but someday I might. I'm trying to decide if it's worth doing now, or if it would be just as difficult to do now as it would be to do at the time I (maybe) install the lights. It all comes down to whether or not the wing tip has to be re-opened to install the nav lights for not. If so, same pain then as now. If not, slightly less pain to do it now.

Sigh. Another tough decision.

Closed!

I received the help I needed to flip the wing over from an unusual source. Months ago when she was choosing her classes at school, Co-pilot Egg opted for something called "Lifetime Fitness," or some similarly benign sounding thing. Much to her chagrin, it turned out to be a gym class that features weight training. That might explain why she's the only girl in the class. In any event, she fairly ripples with muscles now and is certainly capable of handling half of a 60 pound wing. We stopped by the hangar on our way to run some errands and got the wing turned over in just a couple of minutes. Then it was off to the Hallmark store to fulfill our shopping needs for Valentines Day.

Egg doesn't like shopping with me very much at the best of times, but she abhors it when I'm in a bantering mood. The Hallmark trip went something like this:

Hallmark Lady: "How are you doing today?"
Me: "Great! I'm way ahead of schedule on this."
HL: "Valentines Day?"
Me: "Yeah, I usually do this on the 17th."
HL: "Are you looking for 'wife'?"
Me: "Uh, no thanks, I already have a wife, but I appreciate the offer."
HL: "No, I meant the section with cards for your wife."
Me: "Oh. I thought that was kind of forward of you."

With the shopping complete, I dropped Egg off at home and returned to the hangar to finish up the closing of the wing tip. Although I don't think it's anywhere near realistic, or even necessary, to bend the flanges to the level of precision called out in the plans, I do think it's probably a good idea to at least get them in the neighborhood. I dug out my little angle finder gizmo and set it for 30 degrees.

The tabs bend easily with the custom tool given to me by The Jackson Two when they (mistakenly) thought they had no more use for it. The flanges have a tendency to spring back quite a bit, though, so it takes a few tries to get it just right.

I must have been pretty good at the measuring since the part when in just right the first time.

Here's the back corner.

Clecoed, then riveted.

It's just about done. There's an inspection panel to be installed, but it required ten dimpled nutplates and I decided to defer that until tomorrow morning. There's no hurry; I'm going to need some help swapping the left wing with the right wing skeleton that's currently sitting over on the sailboat and I'm not sure that's a suitable job for my little weight lifter.

Ha ha ha, just kidding!

Hey, I've got nothing against a good joke. I don't even mind being the subject of the joke now and then, as long as the word 'scrawny' doesn't enter into. Practical jokes? Love 'em. In fact, I just yesterday had a little fun with a Green Bay Packers fan at work. A few minutes with Google, a color printer, and a little tape and before he knew what had hit him people were questioning his treasonous leap to the other side!

It was all in good fun; no hard feelings, etc., etc.

But sometimes these things can just go too far. Take last night, for example. There I was, out in the 25 degree hangar trying to get a part to fit on the wing tip. It was one of those cases where the drawing in the plans doesn't do much more than show you which end of the airplane the part goes on. Vincent Van Gogh had a better handle on realism than whoever penned this particular drawing. That's usually not a huge problem; each part is labeled with a part number, and as we've seen over and over again, if the part won't fit and you're sure you're using the correct part, you're just doing it wrong.

Or, so I kept telling myself, over and over and over. But no matter how I tried to position the part, it simply would not fit into place. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. There was a clear and obvious curvature to the part that simply had to match the aerodynamic, Bernoulli-driven curvature of the wing, but when I tried to position it that way, it seemed completely backwards. I double-, triple-, quadruple-checked the part number. It definitely had a '-L' on it, and I was definitely working on the left wing.

After an embarrassingly long and futile effort, an inspiration struck me! Would the part marked with a '-R' wing fit any better?

Yes. Yes it did. It fit perfectly, in fact.

I have to confess: I was not amused. Sure, I appreciate the humor and I could have laughed along, but it had been another of those days that seem to be coming more and more frequently... I wasn't in the proper mood for it.

It all looked better in the morning after a good rest. All was forgiven and I had a good chuckle over how gullible I had been to fall for such an obvious joke. And as they say, forewarned is forearmed. I'd now know to be on the lookout for more shenanigans like this.

This afternoon I went back to the hangar to install the forward part of the two-part tip rib that I had failed to complete after my fit of pique. This one was going to be a little trickier because it needed to be fluted to fit both the Bernoulli curvature and the rounding of the wingtip.

Vigilant for another left vs. right prank, I clecoed the rib into place. At first I thought they were having me on again, but then I realized that it was the correct part after all, it just needed a lot more fluting that I had thought it would.

I wasn't quite sure about the proper layering at first, but this way seemed to fit the best. Remember, we're working with a pretty uninformative drawing on these steps. As I look at it now, though, it looks wrong. It fits nicely into a gap between the tab on the front of the back rib and the wing, but it might have ended up looking more correct if I had forced that tab to fit underneath the back part of the front rib. Oh well, I'm not drilling it all back out again for that! I'll see how it looks when I get to this step on the right wing.

I figured the best way to approach the fluting was to just work my way down the length of the rib. I marked a line at the first spot where it looked like fluting would make a difference.

Then it was just a matter of adding some flutes, putting the part back in place, making another mark, and adding more flutes. Rinse, repeat as needed.

As they say in the orchestra, Violà!

Things were moving right along until it came to the next step, wherein I will close out the wing tip at the bottom. The part that closes the wing tip is shaped like something that they would show as an example in a catalog for expensive french curves, and it requires a bit of bending on the flanges in the same way the tail cone flanges needed to be bent when joining the cone to the rest of the fuselage. If I hadn't already had that experience, I might have fallen for this joke too:

Fortunately I now know they're pulling our legs with the 1 degree increments in the drawings. Getting within 10 degrees on any of those bends will be close enough to allow for any small adjustments needed when installing the part. I had a good laugh at the attempted joke, then quit for the day. I wasn't put out over the attempt to play me for a fool again, mind you. It's just that I want to flip the wing over before trying to get that part in there and I can't do that alone.

I'll leave the tip

Well, part of it anyway.

It's the day before what is predicted to be an epic ice storm here in Columbus, but you wouldn't have guessed it from today's weather. The first blue sky for as long as i can remember and a pleasant 32 degrees. Perfect for heading to the hangar right after work. I'm ready to put on the left wing's wing tip.

The wing tip on the RV-12 is a cleverly crafted collection of intricately shaped aluminum parts that are assembled into a wing tip whose feature list starts and stops at "pragmatic." It's easy to assemble and strictly utilitarian. Note the absence of "aerodynamically sophisticated" and "aesthetically appealing," for it is neither of those.

As an example of the cleverness of the design, consider the hand hold that is molded into the wing tip to provide a good grip when moving the wings around. Remember, they're designed to be removable, and given the cost of dropping one, it's nice to be able to get a good grip on them. This little part doesn't look like much, but watch how easily it gets converted into a hand hold.

Two simple (almost) 90 degree bends later:

Then, just because Van's likes to introduce some suspense to every story, it gets set aside while we rivet in a little tip rib.

Once your attention is diverted, here comes the big, shocking plot twist! It gets clecoed into place.

Hmm. It still doesn't look like much. It needs a little more plot development. Unfortunately, that requires work on the bottom of the wing. I need a helper to flip the wing, but when the airport is as deserted as it was today, there's no one standing around that I can enlist as an aid. That leaves the not-so-fun method:

See that little sliver of exposed belly? Well, there's another little sliver of exposed back on the other side, and it's pressed against the cold plastic of the creeper. Brrrr!

I'm under there to cleco on the bottom skin of the wing tip.

I had to roll around on the creeper to do the riveting, too. My new riveter has been giving me trouble - it starts to do a "soft" pull where it seems to be having trouble getting a good grip on the rivet's mandrel. Then it starts refusing to spit out the pulled mandrels. That means it's time to take the silver nose cover off and tighten up the assembly inside there.

I can't seem to get it tight enough to stay together because it would require a thin wrench to get a good grip on the back cylinder. The nice replacement parts kit that came with it had such a wrench in it, but because it was such a nice replacement parts kit, I put it away somewhere where it wouldn't get lost. Which, of course, means that I now have absolutely no idea where I put it.

I put on the front half of the top skin. That was a real chore because as soon as I removed all of the clecos that were holding the top skin to the outermost rib, that rib did what it does every time I remove the clecos: it jumped way out of alignment. That's probably an indication of bad fluting. I had to corral it back into place with more clecos.

At that point I would have put on the last top wing tip skin, but I couldn't find it. Sure enough, I had left the top aft tips back home in the basement. On the plus side, that meant that they will be nice and warm, thus making the removal of the blue plastic much easier. On the minus side, it means you won't get to see the big finish where the cleverness of the design of the hand hold becomes apparent.

For now, here's a teaser: