Friday evening my brother-in-law hung out with me in the garage as I riveted one side of the VS skin to the VS skeleton. It was quite a sense of accomplishment to remove the last cleco and pop the last rivet on one side.
Saturday I took Carice's Uncle John Glancy for a ride in the Cessna. It was a nice day but breezy. On takeoff, winds were 290 16 knots gusting to 27 knots. Not a big deal for departure on 27L, just kept it in ground effect a bit longer to build up airspeed incase of a gust drop. We took a nice flight south off the coast. Visibility on the Vero Beach reefs was top to bottom. Mental note - good time to get some lobster. Came back to MLB over the river for a left base entry for 27 left. Winds were 300 16 knots gusting to 27. Flew final at 75 instead of 60 and landed with two notches of flaps instead of 4. Nice landing. Managed to take a first time C172 passenger up and keep him comfortable from takeoff to landing. Success.
Once safely on the ground we made our way to the Cunningham aircraft manufacturing facility (the garage) to show off the plane build. We pulled a few rivets on the other side of the VS. I ended up finishing the riveting of the VS saturday afternoon. I was a happy aircraft builder!
The Lows
Sunday there was one final step in order to be able to set the VS assembly aside and move onto the rudder. I had to bolt the upper and lower hinge brackets to the rear spar. No big deal I thought. Long story short, some how I cross threaded and/or stripped two of the bolts and they would not tighten to the torque settings called out. they just kept spinning when fully inserted into the nut plates (riveted to the other side of the spar - inside the VS assembly). I decided to remove them and check the threads. No luck, the bolts will not back out. They just spin. Very frustrating!
I decided the only hope of getting these bolts to unscrew was to open up the skin I just riveted on (it looked so pretty) to access the back of the bolts. I hoped that if I placed pressure on the back side of the bolts, the threads might catch and I could unscrew the bolts. about half way through drilling out the rivets I need to in order to peel back the skin, my drill bit walked of the top of a rivet and placed a nice scar on the skin. Frustrated, the next rivet I drilled out was drilled off center and I wall-erred out a rather large oval from what used to be a circle (this is very bad).
At this point I stopped and took some pics to send to Van's builder support. I was hoping to salvage the assembly some way.
Tuesday (today) I still have not heard back from Van's on my email. I gave the benefit of the doubt that they were closed for President's Day yesterday. I was surprised (and disappointed) that I did not receive a response today. None the less, I opened up the rest of the skin on one side and tried my technique to remove the bolt. It did not work. I then began trying to drill out the bolt. These bolts are HARD. It was eating drill bits. Bottom line, I have decided to order new parts and rebuild the assembly in its entirety. It would just bug the crap out of me if I didn't anyway.
The next build day I will move onto the Horizontal Stabilizer (HS).
Huge bummer! What a set back.
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