Time: 3 Hours
I had a long day trip to our home base in Omaha, NE today. That meant I would have access to our mechanics great workshop. So I loaded up some tools and all my z brackets for the tanks before I left this morning. First up was to drill each bracket for the 3 nutplates that they needed. I used a K1000-3 nutplate as a templet for drilling by threading an AN3-4 bolt with 5 washers on it so it just grabbed the threads. That centered the nutplate over the bolt hole and allowed me to fine tune the wings of the nutplate so that they were parallel with bracket web. To help hold it while drilling I used a wide mouth vise grip pliers.
I just worked one nutplate at a time and then moved to the next two. Once that was done I loaded up my #40 countersink in the drill and took the brackets over to the bench vise and countersunk the bottoms of the brackets for the AD426 rivets.
Not a bad day of work especially since I was out of town and was at work! Next up will be to treat all the edges if the brackets and clean them up for priming minus the edge that gets riveted to the baffle as that will have ProSeal on then I will rivet the nut plates to them.
