April 13, 2007: The
ailerons were started while we were doing the fuel tanks. We
located the parts and Angela got to work deburring one of the spars.
May 26, 2007: Angela deburred the other aileron spar.
While Angela was working on the
spar I worked on the nose ribs. Looking ahead in the plans I
noticed two of the ribs get some additional reworking (page 4, step 3).
I'd rather debur only once so I went ahead and knocked that out
now. The space between the flanges get opened up a bit at the
sharp turning nose area of the ribs. This will help the skin make
a nicer turn around these flanges, and appear less "faceted" as the
plans call it. Anyway, the two modified ribs are at the top of
the pic. Once the ribs were modified, I made sure all the ribs
were deburred, and then squared all the flanges up.
May 31, 2007: Only
a few more parts to debur before we can start clecoing and drilling.
Today I deburred the aileron main ribs, the doublers, and spacers
(not shown). Once those were done I squared up the main rib's
flanges.
June 4, 2007:
I clecoed the nose ribs, spacers and doublers on
the aileron spars. Then the #30 holes were final drilled.
June 4, 2007: Next
up I deburred the edges of the aileron skins, and then clecoed it to
the lower flange of the spars. Before clecoing the rest in place
I needed to debur the counterbalance tubes. These are stainless
steel tubes that fit in the nose of the ailerons as you can see, but
only span about 2/3 of the full width.
Once
the counterbalances are in, the skins got clecoed in place. This
is one of those jobs that goes a bit easier with two people so I had
Angela come out and give a quick hand. Once a few clecoes were in
the rest were relatively easy. There, ready to drill! I'll
do that next time.
June 5, 2007:
Hmmm… stainless steel… hard stuff…
yep! At least my broken drill bit thinks so! So, there I
was happily drilling away with a 3/32" cobalt bit, clecoing as I
went. No problem… one aileron leading edge match
drilled. Instead of going to the second, I decided to go ahead
and final drill the first to their final #30 size. My plan was to
use my 1/8" cobalt bit first, and follow that up with my #30 (which
isn't a cobalt). No sooner did I pull the trigger with the 1/8",
and then crack...... lovely :-( Portions of it splintered, and
appeared to wedge in the aluminum skin... wonderful! So anyway, I
used the next size smaller cobalt bit to drill the broken one out...
probably ruined it, but it had to be done. After that, I pulled
out the splinters as best I could with a pair of needle-nose pliers,
and then final drilled the hole with my normal bit... go figure!
Actually, I think I may have been applying too much pressure to begin
with. I was careful to ease into it for the remainder and they
all went without a hitch. One down, one to go...
June 16, 2007: While mainly working on the fuel tanks this night, I snuck this in while waiting on Angela to join me. This is
the first time I've used our drill-stops. I can honestly say this is a
perfect use for them. Stainless likes a slower drill speed, and higher
pressure than aluminum. This means its easy for the bit to break
through and score the interior of the opposite side of the pipe. The
drill-stop makes this a non-issue... sweet!
