Category: Wings

I finished cutting all of the 4" diameter lightening holes in the rear ribs today. That’s 52 four inch holes. Wow. It seems like your forever putting aluminum under the drill. Not much to take pictures of so I didn’t. Next I need to debur, trim the various ribs that have the larger relief and then I can get on with the forming. Oh yea, I also need to clean up some of the tape glue left over from the packing of the aluminum when I brought it home. Acetone seems to work best as long as I have my mask on.

I cut all of the 3" lightening holes in the rear ribs and started to cut the 4" holes.

I completed the trimming of the rear ribs today. I also drilled all of the pilot holes for fly cutting the lightening holes and drilled the tooling holes.

I completed trimming five main or rear rib blanks tonight. I also trimmed the front and rear flanges of all of the rear rib blanks. Only 21 more to trim. Hopefully, tommorrow I should get these done.

Completed drilling the corner relief holes. Next I cut out the corners of all of the ribs. The next step will be to trim the remaining four sides of all the main ribs.

Drilled a bunch more corner relief holes in the main ribs tonight. I only have 6 left to finish.

My hole flanging dies arrived today from Sonex. I tried flanging the lightening holes in the nose ribs. It seems to work okay but the ribs that started out flat are now slightly dished. I don’t know if this is okay or if I’m doing something wrong.

I started to drill the corner relief holes in the main rib blanks today. This is a very slow process, drilling four holes per blank.

This morning I completed the hammer forming of the nose ribs. I think I have one extra so I won’t need to rebuild one of my early attempts that did not turn out. I still need to flange the holes. I ordered the flanging tool last week from Sonex so hopefully it will arive next week sometime.

Two sessions of forming ribs today. I now have only 10 left to form.