Alex's Vans RV-10 Build Log

Starting on the elevators, I began by marking and cutting the 16 E-1008 elevator rib parts into pieces using the bandsaw. I then deburred all the edges using the bench grinder wheels on edges that I could easily reach, and then a scotchbrite wedge attached to a dremel for the remainder of the edges. With everything deburred, I clecoed the ribs together and made sure the parts were labeled correspondingly. There was no need to final size the 1/8" holes as they were already final sized. 16 ribs, 8 per elevator I then moved on to preparing and constructing 2 tip rib assemblies. This involved ensuring the tip rib flanges were at 90 degrees to the web, and fluting the flanges as required to straighten the ribs. Fluting was crucial here because otherwise when the ribs were clecoed together with the counterbalance skins, the holes would not line up if the ribs were not straight. Ultimately, the fluting was not hard and the smaller tip ribs actually came already fluted and straightened, s...

The RV-10 wing kit I ordered back in January arrived at the ABF terminal on October 16, and I went to pick it up on October 17 in a 15' U-Haul truck that I rented.  The kit went into crating at the end of July 2022, and after a short crating delay was finally shipped on October 5. What should have been a 2 day trip from Oregon to California turned into a 12 day fiasco with my wing kit being trucked around the country. For some reason, the crates were put on the wrong trailer and instead of taking a 2 hour drive from Sacramento, CA. to my local ABF terminal, the wing kit ended up in Albuquerque, NM about 1000 miles away. It took several frustrating phone calls over several days to ABF during that time to finally locate my kit and it was then shipped back to California. I think when it comes time to get the fuselage and finishing kits I will seriously consider picking them up myself from Van's! Luckily, other than the odd strap missing, the crates didn't appear to have sustai...

Continuing on with the horizontal stabilizer, I began riveting the front spar flanges to the skins. There is nothing too tricky about this step, except that it involves bucking 232 rivets and squeezing another 8! I am currently able to buck an average of 1 rivet every 2 minutes or so (including inspecting, moving parts/clecos around and all the other small things going on during the bucking process), but I feel that will improve over time as I get more experience. I started riveting in the middle of each skin where the rivet size changes (from 3-4 to 3-4.5) and worked my way out toward the skin edges. To get the initial set on the rivet, I used a lower PSI and then increased the PSI (at the restrictor by 2-3 notches as needed) to fully set the rivet. This worked well and all rivets were flush to the skin, and I also did not have to drill out a single one which I was very happy with. Rather than the standard 1" mushroom set, I used the Boeing Design Anti-Slip Flush Rivet Set with P...

I started riveting the horizontal stabilizer skeleton together, specifically the inboard in-spar ribs to the stringer web, followed by the stringers to the stringer web and to each other.  I was able to get all the rivets squeezed using the flange nose yoke, but decided to switch to using the Cleaveland Main Squeeze for more control over squeezing some of the rivets in the corners of the stringer web. The rest of the 1/8" rivets were squeezed using the pneumatic squeezer. I don't think I would have been able to squeeze the rivets without the flange nose yoke, but it was still awkward maneuvering the yoke over the stringers, as I had to open the set holder as much as possible to get it to fit over. I then had to adjust the set spacing while the squeezer was held over the stringers. Stringer web riveted in place I had a small issue squeezing one of the rivets into the stringers and stringer web. As I was starting to manually squeeze the rivet, the rivet slipped out so that the s...