Found the finished RV 12 at AirVenture and met Richard. I spent quite a bit of time looking over the plane. The paint is awesome. I went back early in the morning the next day and crawled around it. Sat in it for a while and laid under it just looking around. My first impression was how big it was. I'm so use to seeing bits and pieces that the finished product looked huge. I also love this color. I was planning on the current Toyota blue but a little darker looks very nice. Can't say enough about the lines on this paint job. I'd hate to just copy it but it looks fantastic. There was another finished 12 at the show that was built by the high school kids. I compared the edges of each to see if I'm obsessing over deburing - I'm not. The SLSA was what I expected given what I've seen from the finished parts in the kit. The school version was a bit over done as I would have expected. I'm somewhere in the middle and on track I believe.
Nearly complete with section 14. Just have to finish out riveting the rear spar. I noticed that one of the berrings is binding a bit on the aileron bracket so I'll take that apart and redo it. Shouldn't be too big a deal since it uses #4 rivets and they come out pretty nicely. The bind came from trying to get the 426 shop head to sit flush in it's counter sink. I should have taken a bit off the rivet before setting it and I'll do that when I reassemble it. The rivets on the front sub spar were also too short by one size but I had the correct ones so the parts turned out nice.
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| Decided to make them a mirror from the rivets perspective since they'll go on each side. |
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| The correct shop head. Can't say enough about the EZ Squeezer - perfect shop heads. |
I also worked on the servo motor tray since I hadn't got to that before and wanted to prime the parts. The tray came out fine but the arm gave me trouble. The rivets are 3-9 and when they swell in the insert the shop head is a little under spec. I took two shots at it drilling the rivets out and replacing them but wasn't happy. I'm sure it was physically OK but I didn't like the way it looked and it's a critical part so I ordered a new arm and insert and the new one came out as good as can be done per the drawing. A 3-10 or 3-11 would have been a better rivet to use to get the correct shop head diameter but the 3-9 is the longest in the kit. In any case, it's built as it should be per the drawing. Of the 4 main things I like about the RV kits is the access and cost of parts. These were $32 total but if that were a FAA/PMA part it would have easily been close to $100. I believe the gaps in getting time to build are causing some of the problems but you can't tell if it's going to work out until you actually do it.
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| The old and the new. |
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| Much happier with the new part (no primer). |
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| You can see that using the 3-9 rivet the shop head is a little small. But it's built by the book so it's good enough. |
Next weekend I'll redo the aileron berring in the hinge bracket and complete section 14. Then it's on to the ribs.
