Good day, today I’m going to be continuing to work on the right wing leading edge. Before I can being with the riveting and assembly process, I discovered another loose end that needed to be accomplished, and that is drilling the hole in the lower skin surface to accommodate the tie-down ring.
I began by marking the outer edges of the tie down assembly, as well as marking the horizontal and vertical centerlines, which I’ll be using for my measurements to transfer onto skin surface.
The leading edge was put back on the spar. Then I was able to transfer the measurements and edge lines onto the surface of the skin to locate the center of the drill hole.
In the picture below, also note that I have not yet dimpled the spar flange holes of the leading edge skin. I have avoided this because I don’t want to have to dimple the spar flange yet. I’ll do that when I’m working on the wing skins. I figure that this isn’t something that has to be done at this time.
Then the leading edge was removed from the wing, put into the holding fixture and then drilled. I started small and slowly upsized the hole until I got close to the tie down dimension. When the tiedown ring was able to fit the hole, I put the assembly back on the wing to check for fit. The hole was just slightly off center. The assembly was removed and returned to the bench, where I finely adjusted the one side of the hole with a file. Once again, the assembly went back onto the wing, and I was able to get the tie down ring in.
Time To Rivet!
Now I’m confident I have all the loose ends tied up on the leading edge skin, and I’m finally ready to proceed with the riveting. Time to make some visual progress! Riveting this assembly isn’t too hard. It’s a bit of a learning curve to learn how to get comfortable with reaching inside to the leading edge to buck the rivets while holding the gun on the outside. If you have a helper available here is a good place to do 2-person riveting, but it’s certainly not required. You’ll quickly find that this can (more or less) easily be done solo.
All of the riveting on this section of the leading edge is very straight forward. There was only one rivet at the most forward of the leading edge that I struggled with. After messing it up twice, the third time had to work, so I opted to go for the oops rivet. Problem solved!
With all of the riveting completed on the leading edge assembly, I put it back on the wing to clear space on the bench and to get ready for the next task. I must say, the visual progress of getting this done, sure is motivating!
I have a little more time to work today. I’m going to get the fuel tank skin prepped for riveting. As you can see below, I added strips of riveting tape to hold the rivets for the stiffener angles in place.
With all these rivets in the skin and ready to go, my next building session will be to get these pieces riveted on.
That’s all for today folks! Please comment. I love to hear from my readers. Thanks again for coming along for this ride, you make my work worthwhile.
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