6-02>04: The project begins.

The project has begun! With Section 6 - Vertical Stab.

The first day of building went smoothly - was basically match drilling, with a couple of dimples thrown in for good measure. When drilling the skins i need a more robust system for the drilling of the holes with the clecos in - i forgot on one line which side of the recently moved cleco i should be drilling. Perhaps i'll always move them up one, and aft one (so always drill the hole down from the cleco, and fwd of the cleco). We'll see.

The electric drill is working well, and the pneumatic cleco gun is great.

The obligatory photo of the first 10 holes of the project.

Rear spar of the CS coming together.

Skeleton cleco'd and match drilled.

The skin fit pretty well straight out of the box, however both the tip ribs needed to be bent.

Adjusting the tip and root ribs: The instructions are correct in that the tip rob and the root rib interfere with the skin. I cleco'd them in place and used a sharpie to mark where the final hole in the front of each rib would fall. Looking up the Cleveland Reference Table a 3/32 rivet needs 3/16 of edge distance, so i drew a line on the ends of the flanges at this distance. Once this was done, due to the taper of the skins, i found the lower root rib needed quite a bit taken off the upper corner of the rib, and i knife edged the corners a bit. Concerned about cracks, i clipped off a bit from the flanges of each rib up to my edge distance line, and then filed the corners to a radius. For the tip (upper) rib it was a lot easier. The rib is installed upside down with the flanges facing up, so it was these that contacted the skin - it was a simple matter of bending these a bit to ease the fit, not so much filing. I will take some photos of these tomorrow and put them at the end.

The obligatory first part photo after 4 hours of work - event though it is far from being finished, it looks like part of an aircraft!!!!! Yee haw.