Time: 4 Hours
After taking care of some office duties until noon I was able to get into the Hangar for the afternoon. Today’s tasks were to treat all the leading edge ribs. This included edge deburring, scuffing, flanging and fluting. There are a lot of tabs on the forward edge of the ribs that take a lot of deburring. Then I started with the left wing and put the skin in the cradle I made.
You just work from the outboard ribs to the inboard except the most inboard one.
The inboard most rib comes un-drilled and you have to create a splice strip that will help tie the fuel tank skin to this leading edge skin. I measured and marked a line on the 1.5″ splice at a .5″ mark which allows the splice to extend past the skin 11/16″. With the rib and splice in place, the .5″ mark will show through the skin holes, you match drill the splice and rib.
Each rib has several holes that are not drilled so I matched drilled those with the skin. There are a couple of ribs where the rear flange is not drilled so I matched drilled those as well. In the last photo you can see the square hole that is in the bottom of the skin. That is for Van’s stall warning device. I do not plan to install that since I’m using an AOA (angle of attack) device since I’m used to flying with it in the Lear 45. Unfortunately Van’s makes the cut and you can’t get a skin without it. So I will install the plate as it should be and deal with the few rivet holes in the leading edge later. I decided to call it a night and clean up the Hangar to watch MNF. Tomorrow I will match drill all the holes and repeat the whole process on the right wing.
