A brief break

For various and sundry reasons, and none of them truly adequate, I haven't been flying the RV-6 as much as I ought. Last night was clear, calm, and compellingly conducive to completing a competency-enhancing collection of quality practice landings, so rather than absent myself to the basement shop to labor over cold, cantankerous aluminum, I carried myself to the airport for some flying.

It's good that I did, if my first landing was any indication. Had I gone any longer and let my skills atrophy any further, I might actually have literally left parts of the airplane on the runway rather just thinking that I might have. Fearing the obvious threat of permanent damage, the plane behaved much better for the remainder of the evening.

I was back at it tonight, but only briefly. The sum total of tonight's efforts was getting a set of doublers partially attached to the bulkhead that I've been working on. These are moderately tricky in that they use a few different rivets and, as is getting to be the norm, have collections of holes that are to be kept rivet free.

First there were some #4s to be squeezed:





Once squeezed, the #4 rivets get covered up with the doublers. That was kind of weird - typically any rivet that will have something on top of it is a flush rivet, but these fit up into the "folds" of the two doubler halves:



These doublers provide the strength required to hold the second set of wing spar tabs. Obviously there's going to be quite a load transferred from the wing roots through to the fuselage from these tabs, judging from the dense packing of holes that will be filled with #4 solid rivets.

I pulled the dozen blind rivets in each set of doublers but left the #4s for another day.

Squeezing all of those is going to be fun. Maybe I'll go flying again...