With the side skins (almost) completely riveted on, I moved on to working on the landing gear mounts. This involves match drilling a few holes through the side skins, side plates and doublers directly into the landing gear mount flanges.
Steel drill templates are provided to ensure that the holes are correctly positioned, and to help guide the drill bits while drilling through the 1/8" steel. As suggested in the plans, I added some foil tape to the surface of the steel drill guides to make it easier to align the drill bit correctly for drilling.
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| Drill templates clecoed to the side skin on the left side. 7 holes need to be match drilled to 1/4" diameter through the landing gear mount weldments |
After clecoing the side plate doubler and drill templates in place, but prior to placing the landing gear mount, I decided to cut away the corner of the center section rib flange using a hacksaw to make it easier to slide the landing gear mount downwards.
I then inserted the left landing gear mount, but had some trouble getting it to fit through the hole in the bottom skin. I had earlier enlarged that skin hole and made sure the mount would fit through, but after everything was riveted there was still some binding against the bottom skin. A few passes with a 1" deburring wheel in the die grinder took care of the binding.
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| Using a hacksaw to cut away the (marked) corner of the center section bulkhead flange |
After I got the landing gear mount to fit well, 4 bolts were temporarily installed and torqued to spec to hold the landing gear mount in the correct location. I used stop nuts for this step rather than the self locking nuts that will later be used to permanently attach the landing gear mount, as the self locking nuts interfere with the threads on the bolts and can only be used once.
However, torquing the stop nuts within the narrow confines between the center section bulkheads was impossible with the socket wrenches and sockets I had on hand. Instead I took some tips from online builder logs and purchased a cheap
1/4" drive socket set and a
long reach narrow ratchet. I then cut down several sockets to the minimum height at which they would still securely hold a nut, and with those I was able to reach in between the center section bulkheads to torque down the nuts.
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| I found it easiest to cut down each socket by mounting it in the vise and using a hacksaw (along with plenty of Boelube) to cut through it |
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| Cut down socket attached to long reach ratchet allows access to nuts in between center section bulkheads |
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| I also ground down the edge of a 1/2" socket to allow it to fit over the AN5 bolt head |
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| With landing gear mount in position, all holes appeared to align well, and the 4 †emporary bolt went through will little effort, although they were tight, and Boelube on the shank did help pushing them through |
Torquing each of these temporary bolts down is very important prior to drilling the side skin holes because it pulls the landing gear mount aft and ensures the holes are match drilled into the correct locations. If these bolts were not torqued down now, the match drilled holes would be misaligned during final installation and torquing.
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| Steel drill guides clecoed in place with 3 hole locations to be drilled at top... |
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| ...and an additional 4 holes at bottom. The foil tape helps with reflectivity for drill bit alignment |
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Landing gear mount temporarily bolted in place with all bolts torqued down to spec. The AN5 bolt in the bottom outboard corner was the most difficult to torque, butI got there eventually!
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Drilling the side skin holes was relatively easy, first drilling to #30 and then 15/64", with a final reaming to 1/4". I did, however, have to drill slowly and use a fair amount of Boelube to get through the steel. I also placed a bolt through each hole as it was drilled. All drilled holes came out perfectly.
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| All bolt holes drilled on the left side |
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| Lots of debris to clean up after drilling, but I was happy with how the holes turned out. Note that care had to be taken when drilling the aft lower holes to avoid hitting the tube where the main gear get inserted into the mount |
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| From below, left main landing gear mount fits nicely within the hole in the skin... |
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| ... and the same goes for the right main landing gear mount. The brake line holes are also nicely aligned |
The same steps were repeated to drill holes through the right side into the right main landing gear mount.
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| Right main landing gear mount positioned and temporarily bolted in place |
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| Once again all drilled holes came out well, even though I noticed my 15/64" and #30 drill bits were starting to dull a little |
After drilling, I removed both landing gear mounts, vacuumed out all the debris and deburred all the drilled holes in the aluminum and steel.
I also took this opportunity to ensure the brake line holes in the landing gear mounts were correct sized. This was done using a 7/16" reamer.
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| Reaming the brake line hole to size using a 7/16" reamer. Mostly just powder coating was removed, but I felt it was easier to do this now rather than after the landing gear mount is installed. |
While drilling the landing gear mounts, I also noticed a small space between the mount flange and the side plate doubler on the lower flange of the left main landing gear mount. The plans direct you to fabricate a spacer to insert into any spaces 0.040" or greater when doing final installation. In this case, the gap was less than 0.032", but I did decide to create a 0.025" spacer to fill what I could, and used to steel drill guide to fabricate this.
Across the other 3 side flanges on the mounts, there was little to no space resulting in no need for spacers in those locations.
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| 0.025" spacer fabricated to match the steel drill guide. I was planning to rivet this in place with the side plate doubler, but decided against this, as I figured that while riveting the shop heads would deform the this spacer as they were forming. I instead cut away the portion of the spacer containing the rivet holes after taking this picture. |
Prior to permanently installing the landing gear mounts, I moved the fuselage assembly to the workbench, and decided to shorten the fuselage cradle I had previously built. This gave me better access to set the remaining rivets along the bottom of the aft fuselage, and will also make it easier to attach the tail cone which will be happening shortly.
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| Fuselage shortened by about 28". I basically cut through the supporting braces and rejoined them using screws and glue |
I then moved the fuselage assembly back onto the cradle, and with my daughter's help was able to finish riveting the lower aft flanges of the side skins
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| Left lower flange riveted |
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| Right lower flange riveted |
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| Riveting the lower flanges was fairly easy, with the trickiest part being those under and forward of the step mounts |
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| Aft mid fuse skins are now fully riveted as needed in this section |
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| Fuselage assembly sitting in shortened cradle, supported at the main spar bulkhead and the rear bulkhead |
Time Taken: 8.5 hours
Dates: October 28 2025 - November 10 2025
Fuse Side Skins Total Time: 118.9 hours
RV-10 Build Total Time: 1205.7 hours
Priming Total Time: 142.6 hours (not included in build time totals)
