Tools…lots & lots of tools!

Posted On November 8, 2020

One thing you find out pretty quickly about building a plane – you need lots of new tools 🙂 . All said and done it is quite a financial investment in itself unless you already own an aircraft factory, so it was good to have the time before the kits arrived to spread out the large purchases. I’m sure I will need more, but here are some of the tools I have ready to start out on the build:

Taking a closer look you can see a large variety of drill bits which should keep me going for a while! For a full list of what you need, Vans document out all of the tools on their website needed to build a 12:

Then there are countersink cages, various countersink bits, and a bunch of dimple dies and squeezer sets. The strange shaped thing at the middle bottom of the picture is a rivet gauge – Highly recommended so you know if your rivets are the right size and also set correctly…….

To do the actual riveting on the 12, you don’t need a rivet gun or bucking bars – most of the rivets are of the ‘pop’ rivet type, and the rest are solid rivets, all of which can be reached by a squeezer. As I already have a compressor I opted for a pneumatic squeezer for the solid rivets, though a hand squeezer would also do the job just fine, I did purchase a 2nd yoke for the squeezer which is the ‘C’ type, so useful for reaching over flanges when needed. And I got a new hand and air pop rivet gun to take care of the pop rivets. The tool on the left is a rivet removal tool – I anticipate using that a fair bit!…..

You can never have enough power tools and whilst I already had a battery drill I was able to hunt down a Metabo BE18 LTX6 drill that was designed for working with sheet metal and has a speed of 4000RPM (Made in Germany so it must be good!). You normally have to go with an air drill to get this kind of speed, but my compressor is pretty small and wouldn’t really be up to the job of running one so I decided to go the battery drill route. I also got myself the cheapest and slowest cordless screwdriver known to mankind to use with a deburring bit to tidy up all the drill holes….

As for hand tools – you need lots. From top left working right I have Cleco pliers X 2, fluting pliers, Edge breaking pliers, seaming pliers, left and right handed aviation snips. Bottom left is a manual deburring tool, then a torque wrench – I had a larger 1 but you need it to measure in inch-pounds, not foot-pounds. Next to that are some safety wire pliers, small snips, electrical crimping tool, and a wire stripper/crimper……

Also – Clecos, lots of Clecos (see Vans website for recommended qtys) and side clamps

And various measuring devices (going from metric back to imperial is going to mess with my head for a while!)…..

I also bought a label maker and heat gun. The label maker can print on heat shrink tubes for wiring so will be super useful when I eventually get to that stage…..

And a few bench power tools were also on the shopping list, including a drill press, a band saw (plus metal saw blade), and a grinding wheel from which I promptly removed the wheels it came with and replaced them with 2 Scotchbrite wheels (1 medium, and 1 fine) – this is an absolute must to speed up the deburring process and to remove unwanted material……