I went back to the shop this afternoon and finished up all of the nut plate riveting.  Its about time… that took awhile!  A quick dab of primer and I was done. Next I started on the tie down brackets, but didn’t get any further than cutting the spacers.  I finished up with a good shop cleanup.

Here is the tie down W-726 ready to be cut.

I’m not sure if I ever posted about the HF air cutter pictured here.  It was $9!  About a month ago, it started not shutting off…. the cutting disc would continue to spin and air ran continuously regardless of the handle position.  I tried some oil since it looked like it was sticking to no avail.  When I took it apart, I discovered an o-ring that had torn.  $0.55 later an o-ring from the local Ace got it working like new.  This tool has already worked past its expected life time at $9… great deal, and really not a bad tool. 

That is a lot of nut plates!

Here are the two nut plates that fasten to the front of the spar.  Note the warning sticker.  Some guys at the airport were telling horror stories about this… apparently this sticker didn’t use to be here, and they learned the hard way not to ream the holes….

Here are the two spacers cut and the other main piece of the tie down bracket.  These tie down brackets need to be 7 & 15/32″ long.  The pieces shipped as shown here at 7 & 17/32.  Seriously??  I have to trim 1/16th?  Normally I wouldn’t even try to trim that much I’d just use the scotchbrite wheel, but thats a lot of work in this case for the scotchbrite wheel, so I’ll probably trim just a hair off and then hit it with the wheel. 

The empennage and fuselage instructions are written like a series of bulletized steps.  The wings are in paragraph form, and you really need to read more than one line at a time.  I recommend reading at least a page ahead, and a few paragraphs ahead several times.  I use a highlighter to mark what I’ve completed so far. If its not complete, or something I should pay attention to later, I leave it unhighlighted.  Works well. 

Today I finished all of the countersinking for the spar nut plates.  I also attached all of the nut plates (for both the fuel plate and the inspection panels) to the bottom of both spars.  I did not prime the countersinks for the rivets prior to riveting but I did prime the screw countersinks after riveting the nut plates.  All that remains is to flip the spars and rivet / prime on the other side.  This part is quick and I hope to get back out to the garage before my primer hits its pot life today to finish up.  Next up, I believe will be the Z-brackets.

Here’s a shot of the finished countersink for the inspection access plates. 

I drilled, deburred and dimpled all of the access plates and labeled them to their corresponding location.  I did not follow Van’s procedure for these countersinks either.  I again used my back plate with a pilot hole.  The instructions say to use the #40 countersink… and you would have to if you were using the nutplates as the pilot hole, but since I used the backing plate, and the holes had to be drilled out to #28, I used the #30 again.  These countersinks came out perfect as you can see here. 

Here’s a look at my q-tip primer application.

Almost complete….

No photographs today.  All I did was complete the #8 screw countersinks on the spars.  It was extremely slow going having to re-clamp my guide piece each time, but the results were worth it.  I could have gotten the same amount of work done soooo much quicker using Van’s method…