Not a whole lot to report for this post. My friend Rishab is coming over on Sunday to help rivet, so I wanted to ensure the leading edges were dimpled and ready to go.  First step was to rivet the nutplates to the fuel tank splices.  Shown here. 

And then all that remained was dimpling the skins.  

Spring has finally arrived with a beautiful weekend perfect for working on the plane.  I finished up de-burring the edges of the remaining wing skins.  Next I used acetone and cheesecloth to prepare all of the surfaces for priming.  Cheesecloth is indispensable for this purpose.  No lint, no dust, no dye. It took a lot of primer for all of the leading edge ribs, eight wing skins, and the leading edge skins!  Certainly the most primer I have ever used in one session before.  I did break it up into three priming sessions so that I could move parts around in between. A few coat hangers repurposed make a great way to prime skins. I didn’t want to prime the left outer bottom skin until I had set up the Gretz Pitot tube mount I had bought.  Here is the backing plate in place after match drilling to the spar. This was the first angle I used. I wound up abandoning it after the edge distances were out of spec. When setting the aluminum angle in place, cleco the skin and the backing plate in place.  This will allow you to perfectly place the angle using a couple of c-clamps. I measured out where I wanted to put the attachment rivet holes. Here is the backing plate after all of the rivet holes have been drilled. I have it clamped in place in order to match drill the aluminum angle. Here is the new attachment angle.  Overkill, but I prefer to use scrap when available. Using my large blue marker, I colored in all of the area of the skin that needed to be removed. I used a unibit to remove as much as possible and then filed the remainder flush. Here is the bracket in place. With the pitot tube bracket complete (except for the nut-plates), I could prime the remaining skins and pitot hardware. 

The end results. 

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.