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20 Jul 2018

7-07: Rudder Skin Dimpling

Step 7 on page 7-07 was completed today, with both rudder skins dimpled. The holes in the 'field' of the skin were prepunched to 3/32", and the plans did not specifically call for deburring the pre-punched holes between the spar, stiffners and skin etc, i decided to just run a scothbrite pad over these holes on each side. They visually didn't have any burs, but had a very slight lip from the punching process.

I have decided that cutting little lines in the blue film where the rivet holes are with a soldering iron is way more trouble than it is worth. It seems if you keep your workbench clean of too many bits and pieces you can avoid the majority of the small scratches - the large scratches seem to mostly come from the pilot of the male dimple anyway, so these would scratch the skin even if i did only remove the lines of blue along the holes. So from now on, i think the blue will remain on the sheet parts through the whole assembly process (deburring, drilling etc) up to when i need to dimple, then it will be completely removed. This should protect the skin for the parts where i am making a lot of swarf, but save time in not having to soldering iron. In both cases i need to lift the sheet and not drag it across the pilot anyway. For ribs, spars etc, i will just remove the blue right at the start.

The moveable dimpling support tables really came in handy as opposed to a large fixed bench. I was able to simply move them around as required, and when finished store them away under the side bench. 

The laser pointer was very useful for aligning the pilot, and preventing scratches. 


I also setup the countersink cutter and the cleveland trailing edge wedge tool on my drill press, in preparation for countersinking the real trailing edge wedge next.

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