Between a couple of sessions yesterday and today, I final drilled the tip ribs and counterweight support skins, trimmed the trim tab skins, then fabricated the foam ribs.
Here is one of the tip ribs and counterweight support skins clecoed and in the middle of being final drilled. I had a hard time getting the front flange of the outboard tip rib to fit correctly inside the skin. The prepunched holes weren’t quiet lining up, so I tweaked the flange with hand seamers and eventually got it to work.
Next I trimmed a couple of pieces off the trim tab skins and the rudder skins. The trimmed parts are the close-out tabs on the edges of the trim tab, and on the rudder where the trim tab fits.
Then I made the foam ribs. This step has you cut out the template from the manual, glue it to the foam, then cut with the bandsaw. Finally, sand each rib to the exact shape. These all came out looking great. It was weird to cut up a page of the manual, but that’s the best option. Any copying of the page could result in a scale issue, or some other distortion. The foam blocks were easy to work with, and while a little time consuming, it was an easy process.
I clamped a straight edge to the sandpaper to ensure the ribs remained square.
