2004 Flight from KKLS

2004 Flight from KKLS
This photo is from when I was flying the airplane out of Longview, WA. This was taken early in the morning..

RV-6 #25188 in flight

RV-6 #25188 in flight
Doug Eves sent this photo of the Ol' girl in flight. Taken from the ground, this is a great shot. You can see he is "relaxing" in his office in the sky...

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Working on tank skins

I have drilled on the top skin and leading edge skin as you can see. Now I am working on the tank skin. I have been getting it ready to drill by using the original skin as a template for drilling the hole pattern where the rib stations are located. I cannot use the whole skin due to my tank being bigger than stock. My ribs are slightly closer together and I have two more of them in total. I have to take the skeleton and mark the layout of the ribs onto the skin. Then I take the stock skin and lay it over the bigger skin. I back drill the rib station onto the bigger tank one at a time. I use the very edge of the skins to align with each other. I then can see the marks I made through the drilled holes in the stock skin. I clamp everything down an then drill away. It took about two hours to layout the top and now I have to work on the bottom. I not drilling the holes in the back baffle or top of the spar flanger area because I want to move them to actual centers. The stock skins are just slightly off, which is one draw back of have skins drilled and not the ribs or spars. The new kits have everything "matched hole" so there is not this problem anymore. It is nice to have the skins as templates for certain things as it saves a lot of layout time. It also makes are your rib lines straight looking. Hand built airplanes have wobbly looking rivet patterns because they are hand drilled and it's hard to get everything perfectly straight.

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