My wife and I are moving soon, and as such, this weekend was taken up with multiple activities that did not involve working on my project.  I was able to get a little time in the shop on Sunday.

In that time, I dimpled all of the leading edge ribs and wing splice plates.  I also drilled the wings splices for the nutplates and then dimpled appropriately.  Finally, I began deburring all of the wing skin edges and scuffing the surfaces to be primed with scotchbrite pads.

I clamped the hand squeezer to the table to make dimpling easy. 

Here you can see the nutplate drilling jig that I used to drill the nut plate attachment points. 

One of my 3/32″ dies has had one edge removed for close quarters dimpling such as is required here.  You want to make sure you don’t ruin the center dimple with the outer dimple and or vice versa. 

I also dimpled all of the nutplates for attachment. 

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.