June 3, 2020
Before we can powder coat the tailwheel spring mount there’s two more holes I need to drill. These holes are for 2 “keeper rivets” to help align the spring mount with the aft-most bulkhead. Frustratingly, the plans don’t dimension the location of those holes in any useful way. After speaking with Van’s, I was told to temporarily install the vertical stab, because thats what the drawing references for all measurements for these 2 rivets. It’s just laziness for them to reference dimensions on something that’s not installed yet.
So I climbed into the rafters where I’m currently storing the vertical stab and took a measurement. If you’re stuck on this step as well, I put the relevant dimensions on my plans and took a photo for you. The correct measurement from the tooling hole in F712 is 19/32″. Now I can finally send this part for a black powder coat.
Improved Dimensions 
Holes Drilled
The last thing I did today was run a tap through all the outer-most plate nuts that hold the floor in the fuselage to remove the locking feature. These screws are so close to the skin on the side of the fuselage that it’s nearly impossible to get a screwdriver on straight and the locking feature here is more of a nuisance than a benefit. The other recommendation we’ve had is to dip all of the screws in beeswax prior to installation. For the plate nuts that we didn’t strip the locking feature out of, the beeswax will make removing them later a little easier without destroying the lock.
-Paul,
(Total Build Time: 256.5 hrs)