He is currently recovering from chemotherapy and the response from the VAF community has been overwhelming. He went up for a one hour flight yesterday in an RV-6A owned and piloted by Gary Zilik. Gary's response to me when they when I asked him how it went was "he really needed it." Now the effort is on to try to get this young man up to Airventure this year, God willing.
As for the build, I did manage to get about an hour in yesterday to finish up drilling nut plate holes through the tie down bracket and also tapping the hole for the 3/8 inch eye bolt that will be used to tie the aircraft down when a hangar is not otherwise available.
Here I am basically repeating the process of drilling the nut plate holes for the other spacer that I did not get a chance to finish due to the storms the other evening.
And repeating the same bolt-centering process through the holes
Then I had to make a decision about coutersinking the rivet holes. Since my countersink bit broke the other day, and the new one is still on order, I decided to try to finish the remaining holes by using the debur bit, similar to how I did them during the elevator spar construction. IN this next pic, you can see how close to the edge one of them ended up being. Not too happy about this. But the word from Vans and from other builds is that this is not uncommon, and the the load is being carried by the bolt, which is secured by the nut plate. So apparently this is not a concern, but it still bugs the hell out of me because on the other side of this assembly are the brackets that hold the aileron belcrank assembly in place. If anything fails in that assembly then it's "Katy bar the door."
Apparently many are flying like this with no problems - so be it.
There were no problems countersinking the holes with the deburring bit. Here is the tie down bracket showing all nut plate holes drill and deburred:
And then finally came the tapping of the hole for the eye bolt. This was actually pretty fun. It has to be about the largest hole I have ever tapped. ONce I was certain that the tap was going in straight everything was pretty easy to do. Just put it in the vise with wood blocks on both sides, and tap-away. My only concern about this was that I have a chart with the tapping hole sizes that are required for difference size holes. I measured the hole diamter in the bracket as supplied by Vans, adn it seemed as though the hole diameter was a bit smaller than the published hole size in the chart. So I wasn't sure if I was supposed to drill out this hole a bit more first, or just start tapping it.
Since Vans did not mention anything about drilling the hole to proper size, and I knew that this is an area where strength is rather important, I decided not to mess with any more drilling, and went ahead and tapped the existing hole. You need to tap to a depth of 1 inch, AND the eye bolt needs to line up in line with the air stream of the aircraft when it gets tight. I used some 3 in 1 oil to help remove the debris as the tap went deeper into the hole, backing it out occassionaly to clean the tap and remove the cut aluminum slag. Took a few minutes, and came out just fine. Remember, use a 3/8 x 16 tap for this, NOT a 3.8 x 24. Some tap and Die sets come with both size taps, so beware!.
And the fnished hole:
Confirmed the depth by using a sharpee to mark the bolt.
And this one with the bolt inserted and in its proper position:
I will finish the bracket and spacer assembly for the right wing today, and will hold off priming the parts until I have completed some of the rear spar doublers and support brackets so that I have enough parts to prime all at once. My primer arrived the other day and I will get to try out my new spray gun as well.
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