I forgot to take pictures of it, but the first step today was making a bracket out of aluminum angle. This bracket is what an end plate rivets to on the inboard rib. The only difficult thing about making it was the fact that none of the dimensions are 90 degree angles, and interpreting the plans took a little head cocking, especially when I had to translate the left angle illustrated into what the angles would look like for the right side. The bracket also gets a small shim underneath part of it, since the inner portion of the bracket sits up on the nose rib flange. Once made, I clamped everything to the spar and drilled all of the necessary holes.
Next up was to cleco the bottom skin to the spar and drill every other hole in the skin into the workbench for clecos.
In a few steps, the skin needs to be able to be clecoed from the outside, but still lay flat on the bench. To accomplish this, the holes I had just made to cleco the bottom skin to the bench had to be enlarged so the whole body of the cleco could fit down through the table. This takes a 5/8" bit, which I didn't have on hand. The largest bit I could find (outside of a 1" forstner, which just seemed excessive) was a 1/2", so I just used that and wallowed out the holes a little bit to fit the clecos. I did both the left and right flaps up through this point.
I clecoed the ribs to the spar, then flipped the flap upside down and clecoed the bottom skin to the ribs. This is where I got stuck on the right flap. It turns out Van's mislabeled a rib, so instead of getting 9 rights and 9 lefts, I got 8 rights and 10 lefts. So unfortunately I can't continue on with the right flap until they send the right part.
While the nose skins weren't quite as tight as they were on the ailerons, they still took a lot of manhandling to get fit. I ended up taking things apart more than once to work on the flanges on the nose ribs - they don't have a smooth curve to them, which may make the skin fit harder than it needs to be. I used the scotch brite wheel to knock off some of the edges on the very front flanges, basically like I did on the leading edges of the wings. This helped a little bit, but not enough that I could get the skins clecoed to the spar by hand. I finally pulled out a ratchet strap and went that route again.
I ended the day by final drilling all of the skin to spar and nose rib holes.
