Rob and Kelly’s RV-10 N819K

The current goal is to get the airplane ready for the engine, so we need to get it up on the landing gear.  Before that, we want to install the windshield, and before we do that, we need to paint the rest of the interior.  We’ve been doing some fiberglass work on the inside, so while the epoxy is curing, we need to do something else.

Here’s Kelly working on the cover that goes between the wing and the fuselage once the wings are attached.

While she was doing that, I worked on the pieces that attach Kelly’s cover to the fuselage.  Each piece comes straight, but needs to be bent slightly to match the curve of the wing.

Later I worked on the aluminum parts of the spinner (the pointy thing on the front of the airplane, covering the propeller hub).  Here they are primed.

I also painted some stuff.  Here are the brackets that hold the door strut to the door, as well as the engine control cable bracket, which holds the throttle, propeller, and mixture controls below the instrument panel.

Lastly, these are the parts that hold the brakes and wheel pants to the main landing gear legs.

Working on the nose gear leg, I noticed rust on the threads at the end of the tube and inside the tube.  Van’s (and everyone else I asked) says this is no big deal and to just knock off the rust with a wire brush and use some boiled linseed oil to keep the rust from coming back.  In short, it looks worse than it is.

Having already accomplishing building the main wheels/tubes/tires assembly, Kelly moved onto the nosewheel.  One of the steps involves packing the wheel bearings with grease, so she has assumed the title of “grease monkey.”

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Our propeller is here already!  The lead time was supposedly 10-12 weeks, but it shipped less than a month after I ordered it.  We’re not ready for it yet, so we’ll need to figure out where in the house we can store it for a couple months.  Almost $400 in freight charges from Ohio, which reminds me how fortunate we are to live close to the Van’s factory, so we don’t have to pay to ship all the kits.

Here’s a picture of me inspecting and opening the box; there was a small hole in the box, so I was checking to make sure there was no damage to the prop.

Here’s the temporary storage location in our living room :).  We’ll have it out of here by the end of the weekend.

I installed the door struts, which hold the door open.  There are several reports of struts failing to hold doors open in moderate/heavy wind, so I opted for the “heavy duty strut” option.

Also, there were reports of RV-10s with one door held “more open” than another, so there’s an asymmetrical look with both doors open.  I was very careful when measuring and drilling the brackets the struts attach to, and think it turned out well.

We’d been holding the doors open with a ladder up to now, so this will be very convenient.

The cabin top has been fit to the fuselage for some time, but all the work wasn’t finished.  The outside of the cabin top was in a fiberglass mold, so its surface looks pretty good.  The inside is a different story, though.  There are some uneven areas visible from the inside, and unfortunately, not all of it will be covered by our interior, namely the area around the doors and windscreen.  Because of this, we’ve been filling some of the areas with an epoxy/microballoon mix, which requires quite a bit of sanding.  Here are some pictures of Kelly sanding (and no, I wasn’t just watching; I was working on something else).

As I mentioned before, the doors are probably the most notoriously difficult/tedious part of the RV-10 build.  Though we’re not completely done with the doors, I’m happy to report we’re done with the fitting.  Both doors have the latches and door blocks installed, and both doors close and latch relatively easily and fit the fuselage fairly well.  We still need to build up the cabin cover (big pink thing) in some areas to match the level of the doors, but that’s not a big deal.

Still remaining on the doors: installing the windows and finishing/priming/painting the parts of the doors that won’t be covered by the interior.

We decided to go with the “blue” engine color.  One of the benefits of an Aero Sport engine is that they’ll paint it one of six colors for no additional charge.  Here’s what our color will look like.

These aluminum blocks aren’t part of the kit–they’re one of the many aftermarket “mods” (modifications) that are available.  These give the door pins extra engagement, which provides greater assurance that the door will stay closed.

The upper forward tailcone skin is left open for a while, because it provides good access to the stuff installed in the tailcone: an elevator bellcrank, pitch servo, ELT, ELT antenna, GPS antenna, strobe ballast, master relay, and battery box.  With all these things done and wired, we wanted to attach the skin so we could work on the transition to the cabin top, so it was time to rivet again.

Here it is partially done.

Here I am sitting in the tailcone.  I had to do a lot of leaning to get at all the rivets.  I won’t miss doing this.

Here’s Kelly doing the last row of rivets.  These are pulled rivets that go through the skin and fiberglass cabin top, so she was able to do these herself.