Priming Main Ribs   August 21st, 2008

This weekend was spent priming the main wing ribs. I was already planning on spending all day Saturday and all day Sunday washing, re-washing, and priming ribs. However, Fabiola volunteered to help, and we finished much quicker. I didn’t have a place to prime all 28 ribs at a time, so I did most of them on Saturday and then few left over on Sunday.

I used the AFS (now Steward Systems) water-based primer. We first washed with Dawn detergent, then used their acid-based detergent/etch. Even though we have a sink in the garage, Fabiola suggested using the bathtub for the washing 🙂 (“There is A/C in the bathroom, there is no A/C in the garage!!”).

 

After washing, we moved the ribs to the garage and hung them from the wing jigs. Then it was just on to actually spraying the primer!

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Main Ribs Conduit Hole   August 11th, 2008

The move came at a good time, since we were done match drilling the wings and even had the leading edge riveted. Since last April, I did manage to debur and dimple all of the main ribs.

The last thing to do before priming and riveting them to the spar is to drill a hole for the electrical conduit that will carry power to the lights, autopilot (!), etc.

These holes are not pre-punched, but Van’s has a document showing three recommended locations for the conduit. I elected to go with a hole near the bottom, next to the largest lightening hole. I made a cardboard template to make sure all of the ribs had their holes in the same location. I used the template to drill a #30 hole in the ‘Right’ ribs (some of these go in the right wing and some in the left..confusing!).

For the ‘Left’ ribs, I just clecoed a ‘Right’ rib on top of it and drilled through the first hole. Simple.

Finally, I used a unibit in the drill press to enlarge the hole to 3/4″, as specified in the Van’s drawing.

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Today I finished deburring the last of the wing ribs. Here’s a picture of all of them. They don’t look like much, but there’s 40 of these suckers.

I still need to do the tank ribs, so we’ll see ya’ll in a week or so…

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Deburring Ribs   June 3rd, 2007

You may have noticed there haven’t been any blog entries for a while. Well, there may not be any entries in the near future either…

I am deburring all the wing ribs, and there are a LOT of them. Each one takes me about 15-30 minutes depending on how many little bends and slots it has. I’ve done about 50% of them. After deburring, I still need to make sure the flanges are at 90 degrees from the web. Then I need to flute them and drill some of them so I can run wiring to the wing tips.

Anyway, back to deburring…

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