Finalized Shop Setup, Built a Toolbox

Finished shop setup... for now:

My hope was to have completed Van's toolbox project last week, but getting all the bench tools assembled, mounted, and tested took longer than expected.  Much like the week before, the only productive day this weekend was Sunday.  After picking up a bench grinder, and assorted mounting hardware, I made my way to the hangar.  I started by assembling and positioning the tools where I thought they would be best placed, and then traced out and drilled mounting holes for each.  I then tested each by powering them on and waiting for the explosion.

I must have spent an hour figuring out how to set up that band saw.


This time around, I thought I would experiment with a time-lapse setup with my old GoPro.  I was able to record the entire session with a new 128GB card, and I'll edit and upload it to YouTube when I get the chance.

Built the Van's Toolbox Kit:

Confident that I wasn't going to lose a finger to the band saw unless it was my fault, I started on the toolbox kit from Van's.  Van's produces the Toolbox Kit Practice Project to get builders ready to begin their airframe.  Theoretically, the toolbox kit requires the same operations as the real kit.  These include the tedious steps, such as drilling, deburring and dimpling, as well as the more cerebral, such as interpreting orientations and judging dimensions from textual descriptions.  Reading through other build logs, and referring to Jason Ellis' awesome YouTube channel, it becomes apparent that although the instructions are well written, sometimes engineers write in elvish just to keep people on their toes.  

Luckily, I made it through the build without having to call into Van's help line.  This was especially fortunate, as it turns out the Van's crew suspended the line for Sun 'n Fun this week.
It looks like all this organization is starting to pay off.
After gaining an appreciation for the pneumatic squeezer (or just looking for a reason to justify the buy) I tried my hand at bucking some AN470's.  This went mostly without a hitch, with the exception of a few smilies on the face of the box when the rivet gun bounced off.  Oops.  Good thing it's just a practice kit.  From a few threads I've seen on VAF about riveting, as well as an excellent primer on riveting practices, smilies are an unavoidable part of the process.  I plan on practicing on some of the trimmings provided with the kit, and I've picked up a bunch of rivets from aircraft spruce.

Ten hours later, and I've built a little toolbox!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Off to the Races

Image
Vans Practice Kit and Starting the Vertical Stabilizer: Every year, gearheads from around the world congregate at the Circuit of the Americas track for Moto GP.  My best friend, being one such gearhead, came to Austin to enjoy the races and experience the area.  While he was here, we ended up heading to the hangar to try our hand at building some airplane (practice) parts.  We ended working through to step 6 of the practice kit, attaching and match drilling the skins to the 7 before it was time to head back. The following week, I spent a few hours making some more progress on the kit, rounding out the build by wrapping up just before riveting the flanges and trailing edge. I also ordered a few more parts, and finally embedded a back rivet plate into one of the workbenches I've been holding off on picking up a back rivet plate only because I hoped I could source a cold-rolled steel plate locally.  As it turned out, the ease of simply ordering one online outweigh
Read more

Quality Control at Boeing

Image
Prime-a-palooza After what I thought was enough deburring (more on that in a bit), I started priming the shiny bits. The rudder has significantly more components than the vertical stabilizer, which resulted in a number of rounds of priming. Finally, I was able to start dimpling the skins, which was oddly satisfying Anticipating some flush riveting in the near future, I finally sanded the Avery swivel set so the AN426 heads don't sit proud to the skins. First Big(ish?) Mistake So Flight Chops has a new video out about his build!  He seems like a good guy, but honestly I feel like his videos make building seem more daunting than other channels set up specifically for building.  This is primarily because Steve seems so overwhelmed by everything, and he appears to be leaning pretty heavily on experts.  This is compared to Jason Ellis' channel , where he shares not only the build process, but the process of learning, making mistakes, and resolving issue
Read more

"Like Working in a Convection Oven"

Image
A Visit from the EAA Chapter: Last week saw a visit from the local EAA chapter, after the morning's meeting.  I did a little show-and-tell, explaining to some of the members what was going on, what various contraptions were used for what.  To my benefit, some of the other builders in the club took a look over my work thus far. They pointed out that I should prime the final-drilled hinge bracket attach holes as the brackets themselves are steel, and will corrode if not treated.  Not a big deal, I'm going to be priming the skeleton of the rudder next week, so I'll drill out the brackets and touch them up then. Starting the Rudder With the newfound confidence of (mostly) finishing my first actual airplane part, I finally got along to starting the rudder.  Having read ahead in the instructions, it looks like the riveted trailing edge will present the biggest hurdle.  Lucky me, I've practiced once on the preview kit, and did alright.  This one has a pre-dri
Read more