El Gato Dos

Building requires a lot of filing, cutting and fiveting, but one of the key things in building a good, safe plane is paying attention to the plans and the building instructions. Reading the blueprints carefully is vital to building the plane exactly the way it was specified.

The builders manual, especially the manual from Van’s, has detailed, step by step instructions and a lot of helpful advice. Everything one needs to successfully complete the project.

Well now that El Gato [one] has been gone for two years and El Gato Dos is just starting I’m really missing my flying. My friend Rick called me an made the grave mistake of saying he just bought a Citabria… mistake because I’ll be showing up on his doorstep to fly.

Here’s a great video I found of a Van’s RV-7A on an evening flight in Sweeden. Teriffic video and makes me very nostalgic for my evening flights in El Gato. With any luck I’ll be flying again in a few years as El Gato Dos gets built and flying. My thanks to the pilot of SE-XLL who posted the video on youtube.

Building a plane sometimes means you goof…you drill a hole in the wrong place, bend a rivet, make a ding in a skin or some such misadventure. It happens, the thing you need to do is recognize it and fix it. Glossing over it is not a proper choice when building an aircraft.

Repairing can mean simply buying new parts and building that section over again or sometimes it means a repair. The proper means to repair aircraft are documented in a publication of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) entitled; Aircraft Inspection, Repair & Alterations: Acceptable Methods, Techniques, and Practices, publication AC 43.13.

My current goof wasn’t a bad one, it was just ulgy work and I decided that the cosmetic flaw didn’t belong on my airplane. In the photo below you can see two small tabs that need to be bent over by hammering them over the wooden form to overlap and make the inner edge of the trim tab on the left elevator.

In forming the bend I scratched the metal and the bend wasn’t crisp or well done. So I elected to fix this by first removing the tabs and making a rib to fit into the end in their place. Below are photos of the trimming and finishing of the tabs and of the rib I made to fit. More pictures and descriptions later as I make the final fitting and drill it.

Here is the rib I made to take the place of the tabs.

Let’s dig into what’s involved in building an aluminum airplane. One skill that you will have to learn is blueprint reading. The ability to take a drawing of a part with its notes, material specification and dimensions and turn that into a real part.

The photo below is typical of this operation. The blueprint is describing the part “HS-714″ which is a piece of aluminum angle that is cut, shaped, drilled and bent to become one of the pieces that secures the horizontal stabilizer to the aircraft fuselage.

Starting with a piece of 6060-T6 aluminum aircraft angle (the right material is essential to meet the design specifications. Good layout work is essential, layout is the accurate measuring and marking of the workpiece with all locations of the cuts, holes and operations you’ll have to perform to make the part.

In the image you can see that blue layout dye (DyeChem) has been applied to the part. What’s harder to see are the scribed lines marking the end shape of the part to guide my milling operation.

The holes were predrilled by Van’s, but if they weren’t I would have measured and laid them out per the drawing.