Empennage

Now that all the drilling is finished, it's time to take the HS apart for all the prep work. The first thing for prepping is to deburr all the holes that I just drilled. They are deburred on both sides of the parts, for the skin and all the internal parts, ribs, etc. That's a lot of deburring! Then, it's time to dimple.

This is a shot of my new DRDT-2 dimpling machine. I built this tool myself! Well, most of it anyway. You can buy a complete one, but I saved a lot of money by just purchasing the "front end kit" and building the rest of it myself. Why pay to have all that heavy steel shipped? I bought it at a local steel yard from their scrap bin, and cut and welded the parts together myself. Then I cleaned it up and painted it, added the front end parts, and here you go. I'm really excited to use it on real airplane parts for the first time! (I had used it briefly earlier assembling a practice toolbox kit, available from Vans).

Here you can see the dimpling action up close. My dimple dies are inserted, the part is carefully put in place, and the handle is pulled down to dimple the part. So easy! You can also see how I marked the parts for right/left, and so on.

Some of the parts have flanges that are so close together, you can't use the DRDT-2 dimpler. So I put the dimple dies in my new pneumatic squeezer and used it to do the dimpling. This is fun, too!

Here are all the internal parts for the HS. They've been deburred, dimpled, scuffed and cleaned, and marked for correct orientation. They're ready for priming. Next, I'll tackle the skins.

<< Previous | Home | Next >>