My homebuilt adventure
Now that the right outing leading edge is completed I was able to quickly get through the match drilling and assembly of the left outer leading edge. My youngest daughter wanted to spend some time with me as well as try to help out. Poor thing just didn’t have the necessary grip strength to put the clecos in but she did spend some time helping me out.
Another nice day and I finished priming all of the remaining main spar ribs as well as the outer leading edge j-channel that I forgot in the last video. Quickly dimple using my substructure dimple die in the pneumatic squeezer. Quickly insert the J-channel and I’m ready to start riveting everything together. Here is where I started to rivet before I should have. The inner rib with the splice strip was the easy first choice, but for the right side leading edge, you also need to put in rivets to block up the stall warning holes. This is really easy to do with a squeezer if the inner rib isn’t in the way. Oops. In the end it was easy enough to set those rivets with a bucking bar. Read more
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 Read more
With the Ribs all set I need to pull down the tank skins to separate the splice strip. Snips work great and a quick hit on the belt sander and the strips are ready for use.
I deconstruct my old horizontal stabilizer cradle to use for the OLE. Honestly while it worked, as you can see in the video I did end up grabbing the part I cut out of the crate to help pull the skins into the ribs a bit. I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to change the cradle for the other OLE and Tanks or continue with the current setup. Read more
Getting back into editing video and posting a few updates. I’m quite behind as the video for this update has a timestamp of March 4th. Oops!
So as I pondered the order I wanted to build things, and looking around my limited garage space I have been trying to come up with a good build order. I know once I get or build my wing-cradle, I’m not going to have much room to move around at all. In order to put the wings into the cradle, I need to have the main spar, ribs, rear spar, top skin and outer leading edge done. The moment I rivet the ribs to the main spar, I have basically lost a section of my build space / can no longer use the shipping crate I have to store the spars.
Looking ahead, it looks like the Outer Leading Edge can be done independently, so I could build them and store them out of the way now while I still have lots of bench space. At least that’s the plan.