I felt bad about leaving the dogs alone (their mom is on a work trip) so not much accomplished tonight. Well, not much progress, but a lot accomplished because I finally figured out the secret to handling leading edge skins! The instructions want you to put the skins into a cradle and basically try to force the noses of the ribs down into the skin until the holes line up. As I've proven night after night, that's almost an impossible task because of how stiff the skins are and how flimsy the ribs are. It turns out the secret is to ditch the cradle at first and ROLL ribs into place, not push them. I put just one cleco into the forward most hole on the top side, then with a support piece under the skin, pivoted the rib away from that first cleco, basically rolling the rib into the bend of the skin. Doing that, it was pretty much a non-event to get the cleco on the bottom side in place. After that, the rest of the holes were pretty easy. Once about half were done I did have to put the assembly into the cradle to pull the skins together. In all of my reading I never came across people describing the roll. I sure wish I had, because it made all of the difference in the world. It took a process that was hours of struggle and turned it into a 10 minute task.
