It's felt like an eternity, but I finally got back out to the garage today! It's still really too cold to do any priming, so I'm just tying up loose ends of prep work for the skins and fuel tank. I started out by deburring the leading edge skin and finished the remainder of the leading edge ribs (things that can be done with gloves on!). Once I'm ready to prime I will have to take some fine sand paper to the inside of the leading edge skins, as well as the fuel tank skins. The wrestling that was required to get the ribs to fit caused some scratches that need to be smoothed out. It sounds like that's par for the course for these areas though.
Last week I received the replacement end rib for the fuel tank. That means starting over with fitting it to the skins. It was definitely easier to fit the ribs all at once. Trying to get a new one in place without removing all of the others was kind of a bear. I ended up having to remove a couple of other ribs to get enough flexibility in the skin to match drill the new rib. The next step was to drill the new rib for the attach bracket. This is the part that I miss-drilled before and caused the need to replace the rib. Everything is easier the second time around though. This time I pulled the rib out so the bracket could be clamped in place for drilling.
Once the rib was match drilled to the angle I put the rib back in place so the inner plate could also be match drilled. This plate is simply a piece of aluminum that lays against the nose of the rib to help cover up all of the flange notches, making it easer to get a tight seal later.
So now I'm back to where I was before I had to replace the rib. It sure takes a lot of time to unwind steps and fix things, but obviously worth it. The end rib needs to have an access cover installed, which means a big hole has to be cut out. Aside from the overall size, this doesn't have to be all that accurate, so I just used a compass to find the center of the hole and drilled a pilot.
I really dislike fly cutters, so I did a test run on my scrap rib to see how it would come out. It worked fine, so I went ahead and cut the hole in the good rib.
If the temps hold, maybe I'll actually finish the prep work on the fuel tank tomorrow (access covers, vent lines, deburring, etc).
