First Drilled Hole

Have skipped working on the bearing assemblies in order to have more parts ready for primer. Want to make it worthwhile using the HVLP spray gun considering clean up and all the fuss involved for spraying paint. Therefore have moved onto the vertical stabilizer’s rear spar and prepared for match drilling the stiffeners to the rear spar.

                                                    The red lines denote the proper position of the left and right
                                                    stiffeners prior to match drilling.

                                                      A momentous moment … about to drill the first hole.

                                     Match drilling the rear spar flange holes. Used a lot of cleco's here.

For those who are interested, a cleco is a temporary fastener that is used to hold parts together in alignment. A special pair of pliers are used to squeeze a spring loaded plunger on the cleco. When the pliers are squeezed, tiny fingers protrude from the bottom of the cleco and are inserted into holes in the parts to be held in alignment. Once the pliers are released, the fingers retract and spread pulling the parts together tightly while at the same time keeping the holes perfectly aligned.  There will be times during the RV-12 build when hundreds of cleco’s will be used.

Have decided to epoxy prime all the internal parts so I’m quickly running out of things to do that don’t require primed parts to continue. Over the weekend I plan to make a spray box with an exhaust fan in the bottom of the box.  Think I’ll do something simple, perhaps a box that sits on saw horses …. maybe surrounding that on three sides with a PVC pipe frame and using shower curtains or some such thing as the sides. I will have to give that a little thought.