Since neither of us have much experience working with sheetmetal and rivets we decided to order all three practice kits available from Vans and sign up for an EAA SportAir workshop on sheetmetal basics. We agreed that we’d attend the workshop prior to doing any work on the airplane parts. However, the practice kits arrived just before Christmas and now that garage was mostly in order I was eager to work on whatever we could. First up, the toolbox.
The toolbox is a simple project to get familiar with the basics of prep, drilling, dimpling, and riveting. The body comes pre-bent and the directions walk through attaching the sides and top.
We didn’t have an air-compressor yet so all of the work was done without any air tools. The C-Frame was a speedy and effective dimpler, however a bit loud. While using it on the toolbox kit we decided to order a DRDT-2 just for the sake of working a little quieter and lowering the odds of bothering the neighbors.
I continuously found it difficult to have the squeezers balanced correctly so that I was putting enough pressure to keep the rivet flush with the material while squeezing. I also tended to slant the work head of the rivet due to shifting the yoke as I squeezed. The attempts to drill out my poorly formed rivets went poorly as well. We discovered we didn’t have a center punch yet – which it turns out made the whole job pretty impossible. Working through these kits is as much about making sure we have everything we need as practicing our skills.
Overall the toolbox was a fun little project that gave us a chance to try out our new workspace, tools, and skills. We learned a lot about our hand tools and were able to complete everything except riveting on the handle (which we did once the air compressor came in).
Next we tackled the Vans logo light box. This will be a decoration piece in our future hangar, however I was eager to keep working on something so we gave it a shot before the workshop.
The light box was our first practice countersinking and using the rivet gun. I have to say, it didn’t go well. I regret not practicing on something else first, but now we have a record of how bad we were when we started to remind us that everyone starts somewhere. There are marks all over it but we learned a lot and learned how much more practice we need. We’ll be buying a pile of scrap aluminum to practice with before we use the gun or countersink on the airplane.
Finally, it time for the SportAir workshop. We were excited, we’ve been waiting to start the airplane until after this class assuming we’d learn all the right habits and the dos and don’ts from someone with experience. The class ended up being more of a space to work on more practice kits with limited supervision. The instructor was available for questions, but there wasn’t any real instruction given. There was no intermediate review of our work, just a brief inspection of the final project. No training on tool usage or best practices, just a set of tools, instructions, and raw materials. We completed the kits and got our certificates, it was useful to have more practice but it wasn’t quite what we were hoping for.
There is still one more Vans practice kit that we haven’t completed. However, the work we have done so far has given us the confidence to get started on the tail kit. We’ll work slowly have have our Tech Advisor drop in fairly often for the initial work – but it’s time to get started.
Cheers,
-Kacy