It's been a busy two days. First, let's get the bad news out of the way. (It has nothing to do with the plane, so, relax.) In order to be legally allowed to do my job I have to hold a set of "merit badges" such as BLS (CPR), ACLS, PALS, NRP and ATLS. That last one, Advanced Trauma Life Support, is good for 4 years. My current certificate expired on the 11th and I was informed that day that I was not allowed to work until I get it renewed. I had received a warning, that I would be "locked out" of the schedule but I took that to mean that I could not be scheduled for any additional shifts. I was never told that I had to stop working. This has thrown a major monkey wrench into the ER's of two of my hospitals. They are scrambling to find people to cover 4 shifts of 24 hrs each. I've done what I can and will trade one shift to work at a hospital where I'm allowed a grace period to renew my ATLS. Interestingly, I'm being told that the mandate is system wide, yet I'm allowed to work at Grady. Go fig. I renew on Saturday the 20th.
The good news is that I suddenly have an entire week off and I'm going to make good use of it!
As the title says, I got 16 pages done on the Right wing. We're making progress. Marking a page off in the book doesn't convey the prep work that goes into just assembling parts. Most of yesterday morning & afternoon was spent clecoing all of the flap ribs onto the spars. It went great, with only a few expected moments of head scratching ensuring that I was on track for L vs R. Again, I would greatly appreciate Van's making explicit direction marks on their instructions and maybe a few comments to help orientation. For example, on the flap spars a comment such as "The inboard side of the spar has two lightening holes between the 1st and 2nd rib. The top webbing faces forward." Anyway, after a false start or two I got both sets of ribs fully assembled.
I looked at it and get ready to rivet. Then I paused. Then I pulled out the skins and laid them on the table and inserted the L rib subassembly into the L leading edge skin. Everything slid together perfectly. Happiness. Just because I'm anal-retentive, I decided to cleco everything together so it would have some structural rigidity. The ribs fit right in.
Then I realized that the spar did not align with the skin. I spent about an hour trying to figure out what had happened. I never figured out how I spun myself into that circle, but eventually I got both spars into both skins and then reattached everything. The left flap (assembled w/ clecos) went onto the shelf and I went to work on the right.
Last night I finished up deburring and fluting all of the ribs and hardware attach points. Today, I tackled bucking the larger rivets that are what hold this plane together. All in all, I think I did a pretty good job, but I'm nowhere near being consistent. Oddly, I think that I may be holding the bucking bar too tightly. The physics isn't completely clear to me but it might be that if I hold too tight then a lot of the impulse goes into moving my fingers against muscle force and that dissipates energy into my hand. Maybe by letting the bar absorb all of the impulse, more energy is reflected back into the rivet to cause it to set. I'll think about it later.
At least 80-90 % of them look pretty close to the text book pictures. A few are ugly but serviceable. One is clearly a basket case, but drilling it out will cause more damage to the flange and actually weaken the final joint so it stay. In case you're curious, it stays hidden because this all internal stuff that will never be seen again after I close it up.
I'm taking a lunch break and plan to write more later tonight.
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