Wing Stand 2.0, Drilled Out Some of Left Rudder Skin

Well, here I go.

First thing, you are seeing some work from the last few weeks. When I got home from the long XC road trip with the RV, I had to immediately reassemble the wing cradle.

No biggie, just a few 8-foot 2x4s, and a quick redesign of the spar side support.

Not exactly per the plan, but I had 2×4 laying around, but no 3/4″ plywood.

And yes, I splurged for four 4″ locking casters. So nice.

I can’t tell you how nice it is to have 4 nice big casters on this thing. Don’t scrimp here.

Anyway, given that the left wing hasn’t been started, but the skeleton and skins are clecoed together for transport, I knew I needed somewhere to store some skins once they come back off the skeleton.

So, I ripped some 12″ pieces of 8-foot long oak paneling I had laying around, and screwed them to the long support on the bottom of the cradle.

Bad angle. Sorry.

I ripped a 2×4 in half (because I’m cheap) and screwed it into the top support.

I’ll call this the “upper” skin support.

asdf

A better angle?

Now that I have some skin storage, let’s find something to store!

The interim owner of the kit (Jim) had purchased some replacement rudder skins (remember this?) but never opened them. After opening the package, I foudn two brand-spanking-new skins.

Far less damaged than the current rudder skins.

So, here they are now, in my new skin-storage area.

Tada!

Okay, now. Let’s get some actual building going on.

(Well, not building, but un-building.)

Remember this post?

The partically drilled out rudder from 4 years ago.

So, I dug out some #40 drill bits, and started drilling.

Here’s a gratuitous shot of some aluminum shavings.

After drilling out some left-skin-to-spar rivets and the bottom rib rivets, I attacked the upper left stiffener.

11 for this stiffener.

It was 25 rivets for the spar, 20 for the bottom rib, and 11 for the upper stiffener.

56 rivets drilled out, and a whole lot more to go.

(for the record, it took my overall average from 4.28% to 5.19% of rivets drilled out. That’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. (I’ll need to set about 1000 more rivets before the average returns back to below 4.28%. Sigh.)

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2018 at 1:19 am and is filed under Empennage, Wings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.