I was initially going to mount the pitot in the most common place - on the rib just outboard of the aileron bellcrank. After looking at it though, I don't like how close it is to the tie down ring. Widely spaced tie down ropes would come very close to hitting the pitot. I looked up some discussion online and found that this is an issue and people do move the pitot one bay further outboard to give a little more room between it and the tiedown ring. Easy, right? All I needed to do was drill two more holes in the rib outboard of the bellcrank so the pitot and AOA lines can be run out one more bay. I grabbed the unibit I bought not too long ago to make these same holes in the wing walk ribs. It worked fine for those. Not today! My 10 second holes ended up being a 2 hour fix! That's building for you.
As I was enlarging the first hole, the unibit caught the rib material hard! Usually when that happens it just digs in a little bit and you have to back it out and ease it through a little slower. This time it caught and ripped a big gash in the rib. I just stared at it in disbelief. There was no way I was going to attempt to pull out the rib and rivet in a new one at this point. Instead, I ground away the ripped material and smoothed it out. Then I made a doubler for each side to sandwich the rib in between (does that make it a tripler?). One on each side was overkill, but I wanted the sandwich to help flatten out the rib where it got ripped. I still need to drill the second hole in the rib, but after dealing with this, I decided that's for another day after I've had a chance to count to 10.
