Five hours of deburring.  The most fun you can have outside the bedroom.

Sarcasm aside, today I completed deburring all 8 wing skins and both wing walk doublers. I also got a good start on deburring the edges of all the skins.  The next shop session should get me through priming all of the leading edge components and wing skins. Then it will be time to dimple.  A friend from Chapter 1384, Rishab, volunteered to help me with riveting and I hope to be able to do that the weekend of 12 April.

My wife graduates law school in May, and we’ll be moving to a new location at the same time, so May will be a busy month.  I want to have the main wing skeleton riveted by that time to make transport easier. Fingers crossed.

Today I finished all of the dimpling and countersinking of the wing skeleton (ribs and spars). Not a particularly fun job.

Van’s instructs to use a deburring  bit to clean out the dimples on the rear spar slightly to ensure a better fit.  You can see the result in this first picture where I’ve done three turns of the deburring bit in the dimpled holes.

A good picture of the countersinking of the spar in progress. 

It took me awhile to figure out what to do here because these rivet holes are not annotated on any diagram nor are they mentioned in any of Van’s instructions.  I suppose you could leave out the rivets and be ok, but I will put the rivets in before attaching the skins. 

The location of the “missing” rivets is the forward most rivet for each inboard rib where the fuel tank attached.  I have high lighted those locations below. 

Here is a quick snapshot of the completed wings after dimpling.  Not much to see. 

In the process, I came across one countersink for the fuel attachment nutplates that I didn’t prime.  How I missed that for several months is beyond me.  It will only take about 3 seconds to fix, but I was amazed that I’ve walked by it so many times and not noticed until now.  It also gave me another opportunity to play with some more of the features of the app I’m using on my iphone to draw arrows etc.  The app is called Skitch. 

My order from Avery Tools was waiting for me when I got home from work this evening.  Inside were two new deburring bits and a 2″ scotchbrite wheel.  I’m glad the bits came, as they made this evening go a lot quicker.  I finished deburring all of the holes on the wing skeleton and began dimpling the ribs and rear spar.

This is where I first ran into trouble. I noticed that two of my yokes were not allowing the dimple dies to lay flat against one another.  They were squeezing slightly off center, and I didn’t like the resulting dimples.  Here is a picture of a few of my yokes.  The offending yokes are marked in red and my favorite yoke in green. I’m going to have to give some thought as to how to correct this.  It might simply mean it is time to buy a couple more yokes, which I hate to do, as they are not cheap. I started to experiment with different yokes and in the process made a mistake.  I used a large yoke that was unwieldy buy yielding better dimples.  I caught a rivet as I removed the pneumatic squeezer and enlarge one of the dimple holes.  Well, that is now the second time I’ve made that mistake in the building of this airplane.  Normally I don’t dimple with the pneumatic squeezer for this very reason.  But I did, and here we are. I’m not too concerned.  Here’s the offending hole.  Normally this would piss me off to no end, but I’m surprisingly not bothered by it.

I decided to drill the hole out to 1/8″ and use an oops rivet in this location.  Additionally I cleaned the edges with a file to ensure no burs and no cracks.  I re-dimpled and made a small brace to put behind the hole. Here is the result. **UPDATE 2014.11.23** I completed this repair when installing the aileron gap fairing in Wings 35. 

Final product.

Here you can see the location of the mistake in relation to the rest of the wing. Final thought for the evening.  I emailed Van’s Support about this, but I think my solution is sound.  **UPDATE** Van’s responded to my email that my solution was sound and to build on!