Still Working on the Ribs!! — Fluting…   June 26th, 2007

I’ve finally deburred all the wing/tank ribs. I have spent the past few days straightening and fluting them now. The flanges are not quite at 90 degrees to the web, so you have to use a hand seamer to bend the flanges a bit so they’re perpendicular to the web.

Also, each rib comes from the factory with severe warping, because of how it is made. Here’s a couple of pictures of a rib after having its flanges bent to 90 degrees, but before fluting…

You can see how it’s bowed out.

As the rib is fluted, it gets ‘pulled in’ and straightened out. The picture on the left below shows the fluting pliers squeezing the flange, and the picture on the left shows the end result..nice and flat on the table.

I’ve gotta do this all of the ribs, so I’m going to be at it for a while….I’m averaging about three ribs per day. Talk about mind-numbing work…
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Deburring Wing Ribs…Almost Done   June 15th, 2007

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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