Fluting Done

A few more quality hours spent with ribs today, but I'm finally done with deburring, bending flanges, and fluting.  The fluting turned out to be a non-event, as the vast majority of the ribs were very close to okay as-is.  In most cases I actually had to unflute (deflute...antiflute...?) with the hand seamers because the parts were already a little overly corrected by the flutes that Van's puts in.  The first few parts had me scratching my head trying to figure out the best mode of attack, but after a few ribs it became pretty easy to tell where to flute or flatten a rib to make it warp in the desired direction.  The twist of ribs throws a little wrinkle into it all, since a rib can be perfectly flat in terms of the warp but still have a twist to it.  The twist is apparently just fine for construction as long as the rib is otherwise flat though.

So all of the wing ribs are done and put away, and I'm officially in a holding pattern until my tail kit arrives.

No More Deburring! For now.

I finally finished deburring the wing and tank ribs!  Well, "finished" might be a bit inaccurate I guess.  I finished all of the nooks and crannies of the flanges and the big lightening holes, but I will still have to deal with the other tooling holes at some point.  I don't see any point to deburring them yet though, since some of them will be drilled out to larger sizes (to run wiring).  Until I've figured out how I'm going to run wiring and my pitot system, I'm leaving those as-is for now.  It's a nice big pile of smooth edged ribs though...

For now, I'm pretending that there aren't still more ribs in the crate that will need this same treatment.  I only did the main wing and tank ribs.  I still need to do the ribs for all of the control surfaces.  I'll deal with those after I'm done with the tail though.  Unfortunately, the deburring is just part of the prep work for the ribs.  I also need to tweak all of the flanges to get them to 90 degrees, then flute them to take the warp out and make them flat.  I could just use hand seamers for the flanges (most are very close to 90 degrees as-is), but figured a jig would be worth making.  With the seamers I have to tweak, check, tweak, check, tweak, check, but with a jig I can just squeeze and move on knowing it's right.

I have seen a few different jigs over the years, so made a very simple one - just used some scrap I had lying around.  The block that the flange is squeezed against has about an 8 degree angle to it.  This allows the aluminum to get bent beyond 90 degrees and then spring back to 90.  Most of the people I saw online who had made this type of jig before said they used 11 degrees, but I found that to over do it too much.  I haven't tackled many ribs yet, but it does seem to make short work of it.  Whereas it took me a minute or two to get a rib done with the hand seamers, I can get a rib done with the jig in maybe 20-30 seconds.