Building the Dimpler
Since I still have quite some time before the first kits from Van’s arrive, I decided to make good use of it and take on a small side project: building my own dimpler.
I’ll admit, the price of a commercial unit played a role in that decision. At around $1,040 (from ACSEU including shipping and taxes), it felt like a good opportunity to build something myself instead.
The raw material was sourced from Jabimetall. One big advantage was that I could specify the lower angle profile directly when ordering, which saved me quite a bit of cutting and grinding work later on.
The main lever is slightly more robust than the original design, and I also adjusted the geometry so that the final part of the lever travel has a higher mechanical advantage. This should provide more consistent force at the end of the stroke — exactly where it matters for clean, reliable dimples.
For the lever mechanism, I used a push rod clamp (Schubstangenspanner) 6841 from AMF, which costs around €35 and feels very solid.
Once all parts were prepared, everything was welded together. This was actually one of my first welding projects, and while there’s definitely room for improvement, I’m quite happy with how the welds turned out.
After that, I coated the entire assembly with Mipa EP 100-20 Epoxy 2K epoxy primer. The plan is to use the same primer later on for the aircraft itself, so this was also a good opportunity to get familiar with the material.
I had to delay machining the dimple die holders until my tools arrived, as I needed to measure the exact diameters first. But once I had those measurements, the remaining work went quickly.
Overall, this was a very rewarding project, and now I have a solid, custom-built dimpler ready for the build ahead.
The overall costs were around 150€ (35€ for the push rod clamp, 110€ for the metal and a few more euros for grinding blades and sandpaper).
