With the OLE drilled, I start to disassemble everything using my very handy pneumatic cleco gun. With all the parts removed from the skin, I begin to deburr and scuff up the parts. Off-camera I finish up the deburring as well as scuffing and cleaning a number of the parts from previous steps that I have not primed yet.
After letting everything dry and cure for a few days, I begin by countersinking the holes on the splice strip. Since I have not replaced my single flute countersink cutter yet, I was attempting to use my 3 flute cutter. Honestly I either didn’t have the airpressure in the drill properly adjusted or wasn’t using sufficient pressure to prevent the cutter from jumping. End result was a few countersinks that didn’t look good. Finally decided to use my drill press and started getting much better results.
With the strip countersunk, I got out the nutplates and a screw so I could start mounting the nutplates to the strip. I used the screw in the #19 hole to keep the nutplate centered, then riveted on half the nutplate. Then swing and rivet the other side. With the squeezer this was fairly easy.
Once the splice strip was done, I then had to dimple the skin. Again, I was able to do this Solo, but a second set of hands, or an additional feed table would make this much easier. I see a second table being built very shortly. also I need to upgrade the table a bit as the corners of my plywood did end up scratching the primer in a few places. Nothing major, but still an area for improvement.
With the skins dimpled I then used a substructure die to dimple all the ribs. Then the skin was back into the cradle and I can start assembling the parts. Things go together so much easier with the dimples and I quickly get just about everything ready for riveting.
Only gotcha was I did not prime the J-channel yet, so looks like I’ll be doing another round of primer this afternoon on the remaining main spar ribs as well as the J-channel so I can button up the OLE.
Weather is looking great and hoping to spend more time in the garage getting these wings done.