Started prep work on wing skins

 Steve & I bucked 6 rivets holding one of the nose ribs.  That officially completes page §29-11 R.  Still waiting on the missing rivets to finish off the entire section, but I'm sure they'll arrive eventually.   By the way, I didn't show you a 'big picture' of the current organization of the workshop.   Here you go!  On the right are both of the wing assemblies.  They are 'backwards' from this point of view with the Left wing on the right, and vice versa. From here, you can't see the clecos that are still in place.   The work tables are now freely accessible and ready to be used in prep work.

workshop with cleared tables

I finished §31-05; prepping the bottom middle skins.  (The inner skins are pre-assembled as part of the fuel tanks).  On paper, this was very simple—attach a dozen nut plates to the access holes.  In reality, it took about an hour to do each skin.   Firstly, there's an awful lot of surface area which means that there's a lot of the protective blue plastic that must be pulled off.  For small parts, it's easy.  For these guys, I was actually getting painful finger tips from pulling and then peeling off the adhesive.   Life got a bit better when I borrowed my wife's hair dryer and heated up the surface as I went.

Secondly, there's a lot of linear edge that needs to be deburred.  The pieces are too large to hold and run by the scotch bright wheel on my bench grinder.  They are way too big to use the tiny Dremel wheels.  I had to drive to the Aviation Division of Roush Hardware and pick up a scotch bright wheel that I then put in a hand drill and could finally deburr the edges with something like efficiency.

Thirdly, some of the edges need to be "broken".  When two pieces of sheet metal are riveted together, the top piece can have a tendency to have its edge bend upward slightly due to the compression of the nearby rivets.   To counter this, the appropriate edge is 'broken' with a downward flare before being assembled.  I happen to have an outstanding custom built tool for this purpose.   It's a pair of vice grips with the jaws replaced by steel rollers, one of which has a nice tapered flare.  I just roll it along the correct edge and it produces a clean, uniform break.

[I will take some pictures of the broken edge and tool  and edit this post to include them the next time I update this blog.]

right lower middle wing skin 

resting on top of the right wing assembly