To start off the day, I decided to make a 10 minute task an hour long task. It's Saturday, so why not? I attached the doubler to the rear spar, which should have been pretty straight forward. There are a number of holes that need to stay empty because they are used to rivet another part later on. I carefully kept away from these holes and riveted everything else. For my very first rivet, I didn't have the squeezer set right and it completely over squeezed, so out came the drill to drill it out and try again. The second time it went a lot better. That is, until I got to one very awkward spot and didn't get the rivet seated in the countersink. So here comes the drill again! With that one fixed, I realized I had one more rivet to go in the inboard rib flange. I put that in, squeezed it perfectly, and stepped back to admire my work....that was one of the holes that was supposed to stay empty for now! My drill got a good workout today.
Next up was making the stiffeners for the tank.
I've made so many stiffeners in the build by this point, they are pretty quick to finish. After cutting, sanding, and smoothing the edges, I attached them to the tank skin and final drilled them.
The Z brackets for the tank baffle were just as time consuming as I remember. In fact, I don't really remember much about doing them on the last tank. The orientations of the flanges are not the same, so after my riveting fiasco that started the day, I was careful to check and double check before I started drilling. Each flange gets one reference hole drilled in them first, then that is used to cleco the bracket to the baffle and match drill the rest.
The end brackets are clecoed on, but the internal brackets have to be blind riveted on in order to test fit everything to the spar. Hopefully drilling the blind rivets out goes easier than it did last time.
I put the tank onto the spar and match drilled all of the Z brackets to the spar, as well as the outboard end to the splice plate that connects it to the rest of the leading edge. Then the tank came off the wing again. Next up will be match drilled everything, finishing the Z brackets, and prepping the spar and wing ribs (countersinking and dimpling).
