For those of you who missed Karl’s meeting or were unable to locate his, rather elusive, driveway / shop; here is a recap of the event. From my count, about 12 of us managed to locate it. Karl provided some drinks, snacks, and dessert. Karl is building an RV-7. He had on display a completed vertical stabilizer, a partially completed wing, two control surfaces, that looked to be mostly complete (not sure if they were flaps, ailerons or possibly elevators), and he had the other wing spar on display. He has a handful of boxes of parts awaiting assembly. I didn’t get any details from Karl on what engine he is planning to put in or really anything beyond what he had completed. I’m not sure what kind of time frame he is looking at for the project either. Karl said that while he has been working on the project for a while now, at least 40% of the progress has been made since his retirement in April. It must be nice to have all that extra time now.
Now, while the vast majority of this club has a fairly intimate relationship with the building of an RV this was my first experience seeing a partially completed RV project. That said, i don't think I need to give the nitty gritty details about the design and build of the RV-7. My initial thought was “that is a lot of riveting.” Karl gave us his horror story (learn from it) of dropping his bucking bar in the wing and putting a nice little hole in the leading edge. This required the installed rivets to be drilled out and the skin replaced, bummer. Any job you do over is no fun. From my vast experience viewing RV projects, it looks like Karl is doing a great, thorough job with all of this riveting and build work. Having never looked at the spar on a cantilevered wing before, I was very impressed by its design. It’s a nice, beefy looking conglomerate of formed, machined, anodized and riveted aluminum. Thanks for hosting us Karl and good luck with the rest of the build. I look forward to checking in as your build progresses.
Here are some pictures of the project - Karl's Build Meeting Photos. If anyone else took some they would like to share feel free.