5/10/2006
Tonight was WAY cool!! Brit (my wife) got her first shot at the rivet gun tonight!! Isn't she just adorable!!
Before she came out to help rivet, I had to get the countersinks in the spar done for the nutplates and inboard Z bracket. I actually tried riveting these by myself, and that was a bad idea. I have some touching up to do on the spar waffle reinforcement plate. Not bad, just missed the shop head once. Here's a couple of pics AFTER Brit helped me.
The shop heads are really hard to get at here. They are not perfect, but good enough to hold the nutplate in place. The structural piece is the bolt that goes in there. I did drill out two of them to redo though. The inboard bracket gets bolted to the spar at this point.
And then the tank is set in place!
This was pretty freakin' cool! I cleco'd the right tank to the spar, and took a couple of shots of the gap between the tank and leading edge skin, and the tank and top skin. The gap is tiny, almost not even there...the pic on the left is the joint between the tank and LE skin. The pic on the right is the tank to top skin gap. The tank to LE looks wider than it is. I'm really happy with this at this point.
Then I used my 12" #30 bit with a drill stop to drill the inboard rib/baffle/bracket, and cleco that in place. This is the only accessible part right now until I remove the LE to get to the other side of the tank.
Sweet!!
1.5 hours