Tonight I made a couple more access panels for the wings. I had originally made enough, but I had used one to mount a Dynon pitot heat regulator, which involved drilling and dimpling 4 holes in the panel.
I then added the nut plates to the bottom outboard skin around the access panel openings.
I also countersunk the aileron attach bracket, where the pushrod attaches to the aileron. The pushrod is attached via an AN509-10 countersunk bolt.
Tonight I finished riveting the bottom wing skin. Overall, it all went very smoothly. There are a couple of over driven rivets in there, but nothing that I felt worth removing and re-doing.
Because it’s not possible to see the ship head or bucking bar when setting the rivet, I used a couple of spacers (small blocks of wood taped to the bucking bar) to help brace against nearby rib or spar flanges to help align the bucking bar. It helps to be ambidextrous with the rivet gun, and to have a long reach.
The last two nights I’ve continued riveting the bottom, outboard, left wing skin. Nothing to report, other than a minor issue when I realized the j-channel (short) that was installed by the quickbuilders was not match drilled. This makes sense, because it probably needs to be match drilled through the skin and j-channel. The annoying thing is that Vans doesn’t mention match drilling the j-channel at all in the instructions, so it’s easy to miss this step. Anyway, because I already had the skin half riveted on by the time I realized these holes were not there, I was limited in options, particularly when I comes to dimpling. I match drilled the holes, reamed them to #40, then used my pop rivet dimpler to dimple through the skin. This resulted in just enough of a dimple on the j-channel.
Last night and tonight I got started riveting the bottom skin onto the left wing. With the quick build wings, the inner skins are already riveted, as are the top and leading edge skins, so this one outboard skin is the only one that needs attaching. I had previously match drilled the j-channel, so I could jump right into riveting.
I started by clecoing the skin on and carefully checking the clearance with the leading edge skins. I’ve found that there’s a tiny amount of sag in the wings, which is corrected when the ribs are all aligned and clecoed to the skin. Getting the skin on, and then getting the ribs all straightened out by clecoing everything allows for some checking of clearances. I found that there’s outboard 18 inches of the bottom skin needed about 1/32 of material to be removed, so the skins can butt up to each other with no overlap.
Once I had the skin trimmed and rechecked, I got started riveting. It’s a bit of a stretch by yourself, but totally doable. I made sure to put plenty of padding down on the spar in case I dropped the bucking bar.
After two sessions (last night and tonight), I’m about 1/4 of the way through the riveting. I’m hoping I can knock this out within a week, it just depends on how much time I can spend in the garage.
