July 11 & 12, 2020
We couldn’t come up with any good reasons to hold off on riveting the wing skins, so the next couple of days were spent preparing for that. We went through that good old routine of match drilling, deburring, and dimpling the skin for both wings.
While that took a while for the ~400 holes between the two skins the next step took even longer. The wings were full of bits of rivets that had been drilled out from other work we had done earlier. When we moved the wings they rattled like maracas. It took several rounds of vacuuming, blowing out the wing with an air nozzle, and probing for the last couple of bits with a mirror pulling them out by hand but eventually there was no longer any rattle.
For the left wing, we also riveted in the mounting plate for the GAP26 AoA probe and zip tied all the wiring in place. We also bolted the heater regulator box in place and torque striped the bolts.
All of the wing rivets need to be bucked. Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before I have another free couple of days to spend with the plane thanks to work so Paul will have to spend his time on other things in the meantime.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Time: 407.6 hrs)