Moving Time

We are in the process of moving from The Bay Area south to San Diego county. With everything going on, I’ve not been making much progress on the build. The goal is to be moved by August, although it might be a bit later if the house isn’t ready on time.

In parallel I’ve been talking to Vans about my Quickbuild kit. It’s been found to have defective primer, which isn’t a big surprise as I’ve noticed it runs off easily and I found some corrosion on the wings. Because I’m moving, and because my kit was perhaps the first one impacted, I have priority in the queue. I decided it would be best to replace the kits, and to coincide with my move.

So most of the work I’ve been able to do in the last 6 weeks has been removing systems and components from the wings. This was a bit demoralizing at first, but I quickly started thinking about how to do everything better the second time.

Wings back to their original state
Some of the wing components
I removed the bottom skin I had previously installed. Here I have removed the manufactured heads of a bunch of rivets. The skin came off quite easily in the end

Countersinking wing root fairing attach points

I found some posts regarding countersinking several holes where the wing root fairing attaches to the wing. The plans are a little vague, but the consensus online (and endorsed by Vans) is to countersink several holes in the top skin and the fuel tank attach point. The tricky part is that the quick builders have already put the nutplates on, so the countersink pilot is too wide to fit into the threaded nutplates. The trick is to use a different size (#30) which fits inside the threaded nutplate and cuts just the same.

I tried this on a couple of holes. The single-fluted cutter does a nice job.

It seems like dimpling all of these holes would have been better, but that’s not an option with the Quickbuild. I’m hoping all these knife-edges won’t crack over time.

This hole looks wallowed, but the camera wasn’t square with the hole.
Single-fluted #30 cutter