Time: 6 Hours
Now that all the substructure has been final drilled to match the skins all the hikes need to be deburred. The plans have you start with all 6 skin panels, 2 forward, 2 mid and 2 aft skins. That’s a lot of holes to debur since you have to do both the inside and the outside parts of each hole. So with a fully charged electric debur tool I went to work. Not to much to show with this process so I didn’t take any photos. I ran the battery dead before I got halfway done so I had to move on a little while it charged up. The forward skins have 2 reference tabs at the bottom for fitting and they need to be trimmed off at this point.
I also received a few goodies in the mail this week. First up is my Andair fuel valve. These are precision made valves that really make the stock valve that Van’s sends look pretty bad. A lot of builders go this route and there is a lot of documentation showing great installs of this valve.
I also got a gift certificate from the best girl friend ever to Cleveland tools which I used to but a rivet spacer that allows me to evenly space rivet holes when I freestyle build.
The other thing I got was a tail light adapter that will get riveted to the lower part of the rudder and make maintenance easier down the road.
Another item that was delivered was my battery hold down. I want to install the battery in the forward baggage lower area based in my buddy Glenn’s experience with it in the same place. I wanted a sleek yet strong mount that would allow easy battery replacement. Here is what I came up with and will make an attachment plan later this week.
I finished up the deburring of the skins and all other items called out in the plans. I then moved on to the dimpling process. There are a lot of areas that get dimples and some that don’t. I used tape to mask the holes that I don’t want to dimple, these are mainly ones that line up with the longerons as they were countersunk.
I made sure to scuff the items before dimpling them to make it easier later for priming. Not a lot of pictures today but a lot of work done. Another good day in the Hangar.
