I've had some help in the shop this past week! This post covers a couple of days of work on the left wing. To get our feet wet with riveting, we tackled the left leading edge first. I was very happy with the results! Riveting with a partner is easier for certain things and harder for others, just depending on the position of parts. I think in general the quality turned out higher by having two people working together.
After the leading edge was done, we got to work on prepping the spars on the jig. All of the skin attach rivet holes needed to be countersunk, all of the rib holes deburred and dimpled, and the rear spar dimpled. This is where an oops snuck in. A miscommunication on where to stop dimpling the rear spar caused the pneumatic squeezer to get caught on the doubler and slam into the rear spar flange. It was a shocking amount of force - it caused the dimple die to actually cut through the flange! I thought it might be fixable by cutting out the bent portion and reinforcing it, but Van's recommended just replacing the spar. That makes sense given the importance of the spar, and the fact that it's a relatively cheap part. It's probably only one day of work to disassemble this one and rebuild and assemble the new one. I will have to call and get it ordered. Luckily, if timing works out, there is a builder from North of Seattle who is going down to Van's to pick up a kit in the next month, and he said he'd be happy to haul the spar back with him to save me the cost of shipping.
