Alex's Vans RV-10 Build Log

With some priming practice under my belt, it was time to prepare all the vertical stabilizer, rudder and horizontal stabilizer parts that I had been working on in recent weeks for priming. I started by cleaning the smaller parts with EkoEtch and laying them out to dry on my priming table. Ribs and stiffeners etched and ready for priming For the skins and larger parts (think spars!), I decided to take them outside to clean them with EkoEtch as it was easier to rinse them off using the garden hose. Etching the skins outdoors I also took pictures of sharpie markings I had made on the spars for bracket orientation. This will help later during riveting as the EkoEtch will remove any markings on the aluminum. Bracket alignment marks on vertical stabilizer spar More bracket alignment marks With all the parts cleaned and etched, I left them to dry thoroughly in preparation for priming the next day. All parts etched and ready to prime Priming Having set the spray gun during the priming practice...

Time to prime! Now that I have several RV-10 parts that need to be primed, I decided to pause building and focus on priming. I have never primed metal before, and I have also never used a spray gun, so I needed some practice.  Parts Prep In order to get some practice pieces for priming, I decided to disassemble the first Van's trailing edge practice kit that I put together a couple of months back. This also gave me plenty of practice in drilling out rivets that I have not done a lot of so far. Drilling out blind rivets was easier than I thought it would be Drilling out the #40 countersunk rivets was easy enough, as long as I kept the hole centered. Small bursts of the drill when starting a hole helped to align the bit to the center of the rivet. One skin off, another to go Stiffener rivets were drilled out with the assistance of the vise A perfectly centered hole. Once deep enough, the head just pops off using a pin punch Growing pile of drilled out rivet heads and tails To drill o...

I read ahead in the plans, specifically section 8 on the horizontal stabilizer, and saw that the first few steps have you preparing the spar and doubler and then priming those before continuing. I decided to just go ahead and do these few steps so that I could prime these two pieces alongside the rudder and vertical stabilizer parts. Before doing anything I decided to straighten the horizontal spar doubler as it had a significant bow. Using my vice and a mallet, and the instructions given in section 5, I slowly proceeded to remove the bow. After a few minutes of whacking the doubler with the mallet, the bow was virtually gone. Using a mallet and a vice to straighten the doubler Next I had to debur the edges and lightening holes of the spar and the edges of the doubler. The spar was one of the biggest pieces I had deburred to date, and I decided to chuck my 1" scotchbrite wheel into a drill to help speed up the process. Deburring the horizontal stabilizer spar edges... ...and the d...

Now that the rudder stiffeners and ribs were cut to size, it was time to assemble the rudder skeleton. I just had to pay attention to the overlapping of the stiffeners, but otherwise this was easy and I took time to appreciate how big the rudder actually is! All the spar and rib rivet holes were already final sized. I only had to final drill the stiffener 1/8" rivet holes as they were slightly smaller than final size. Rudder taking shape Next it was time to attach the skins to the skeleton. As usual, I removed the blue vinyl from the inside of the skins, paying attention to making sure that the skins were oriented correctly so that one was left side and the other was right side. I also removed strips of blue vinyl from the outside skin surface along the rivet lines and then deburred the skin edges and clecoed each skin to the skeleton. Prior to clecoing the trailing edge, I trimmed the trailing edge wedge to size. Below, you can see that it was slightly longer than the rudder as r...

In an effort to make my priming efforts more productive, I decided to start work on the rudder so that I can prime those parts along with the vertical stabilizer parts. After pulling out all the parts for the rudder (except for skins) from their various locations around my garage, I began by marking the cut points for the rudder ribs. Rudder parts While examining the parts that form the internal ribs and shear clips, I noticed some brown discoloration around several holes and edges. I wasn't sure if this was some form of corrosion because the brown residue was easily wiped away with a finger, however there was also some roughness left in the aluminum around a few holes.  A quick email to Van's support had them tell me that this was not corrosion, but due to the laser cutting of certain parts (that was recently implemented to speed up kit production) and nothing to worry about. It also appears that the laser cut parts are produced without the protective blue vinyl, so I'll b...