Tag: Bottom Wing Skins

I didn’t get a ton of time as I thought this would take alot more time with two people. But I decided to try it myself and I got fairly good results. I’m not really happy with a couple of my rivets because it is hard for me to determine if my bucking bar is flat with the surface or not. It wasn’t a few times and it actually left a couple of marks in the skin because of it. Luckily this is the bottom side but still I want to do a better job than this. So I might have to have someone else with the rivet gun while I solely focus on bucking. I got almost all of the rear portion of the inboard skin done. As you can see from the yellow rivet tape I am still lacking a few rivets before that section is done.

Alot of work today! The first thing I did today was I went to the storage unit and did an inventory of the seat kit that arrived a few weeks ago. They emailed me one so I could do a proper inventory and I was missing more than I thought I was missing. I sent the list of items I was missing to them so hopefully they will ship those soon. Not like I’m in a huge rush for them but I hate having things hanging because I might forget.

The right wing is ready to be riveted which I’ll start sometime tomorrow. We’re heading to clean the church in the morning so hopefully not too long after that I’ll get started. This will be an interesting job since they are all solid rivets and the skin will be pealed back while I rivet it down one layer of rivets at a time from the rear to the front.

I also drilled the left wing and deburred at least the top of the skins while they were still hanging. But I’m going to wait on those until after I get the right wing done since I don’t have a ton of room to do both of the skins sets at the same time. I also need to figure out how to run the wire out of the conduit down to the pitot tube. Something more to research how to do properly.

I got the skins out of the attic today with the help of the boys. I got the pitot tube initially drilled along the spar edge and got the side bracket drilled as well. I used the 3D printed template from Allan Glen and it was almost spot on. the three holes along the spar did not match exactly so I had to drill out some of the plastic to make the template work but the rest of the holes are fine since the pitot tube does not come predrilled with any holes. I will get those drilled tomorrow now that I have the skins mounted and can verify they are good to go before removing them, dimpling, deburring, and priming them. I also need to drill the J channel stiffeners in specific areas to match the skin. I would have gotten further along but my network change tonight took way longer than I expected due to unforeseen issues.

First, but pretty easy first steps on putting the bottom wing skins on, but took a bit of time to complete tonight. I got all of the skins deburred, dimpled, primed and riveted tonight that cover the gap between the wing and the flaps and ailerons. Luckily they were final sized holes so that cut about and hour to three hours off my time to cleco it in place, drill them all, remove it and deburr everything. Looking good and I plan on installing the ailerons and the one flap I have done tomorrow.