There is a reason that I will not put to many pictures of me in this log.  Camera's and me don't get along (at least not being in front of them).  Here is dufus removing the lower skins to the right wing.  I broke out my pneumatic cleco installation/removal tool.  For $25 it is a great tool on the wings.  There are a ton of clecos on the wing and this made removing the lower skins about a 5 minute job.  It also was wonderful at saving my forearm muscles.

I had no idea how to run the self timer on my camera so these are practice pictures I guess.  My building partner (wife) is having a retreat weekend with all of her girlfriends.  NO HUSBANDS ALLOWED.  She don't know how to run the camera either so it probably didn't really matter to much that she is off playing with her friends while I slave away in the garage.

The picture below isn't very hard evidence of how hard I am busting it this weekend working on the plane.

I am still continuing to tweak my wing stand.  When I initially hung and trued my wing, I did not brace the outboard end of the rear spar to the wing stand.  I removed my bottom skins this morning and decided to check sag, level and twist in the wing.  All was still good, but I decided to brace the rear, outboard side of the wing.

I used some aluminum angle to connect to the aft tooling hole on the outboard rib.  Before I mounted the aluminum support angle to the wing stand, I put a big and wide notch in the aluminum angle to allow me to put the lower skin back on.  It is amazing how much easier it was to notch the aluminum angle when it was not already clamped to the wing.

For the aluminum angle that connects to the wing, I slotted the hole for the bolt by drilling a couple of holes next to each other and cleaning out the slot with a rotary burr bit.  This allows the angle to slide up to the wing rib and not pull on the wing when I tightened everything down.  After I bolted this all up, I again checked sag, level, and twist of the wing.  All is good and now this wing is extremely solid in the stand.  I feel alot better about drilling, deburring (i.e.: working on the wing) without fear of inducing some twist to the wing.

As I eluded to earlier, I removed the bottom skins and worked on the bottom side of the wing ribs.

• Deburred all bottom rib holes.
• Dimpled all bottom rib holes.
• Thought about deburring and dimpling the lower skins...  NOPE tired of that task already.

I don't have any pictures of this, but come on, at this stage of our building we are all masters of deburring and dimpling.

April 16th and it is already in the 80's.  This is a temperature shock as it was only in the lower 60's yesterday.  When I ran to the hardware store, the car said it was 90 degrees out in the sun today.  It is to early to be this warm.  A couple more weeks and this temperature will be accompanied by sticky humidity.  YUK!!

On my last log entry, I had a problem with the leading edge having a slight bulge just aft of the forward most pre-punched hole.  When I first put the ribs in the leading edge skin, I had a severe mis-alignment (off my at least one hole diameter).  I eventually got everything cleco'd, but there was a lot of pressure between the skin and the ribs.

I had a couple of builders at the EAA meeting I attended earlier in the week tell me to take the rib flange knuckles to the scotchbrite wheel and remove some material.  After I posted my intentions, another builder e-mailed me and recommended against that approach.  Okay, now what do I do?

When I removed the rib(s) and took a closer look at them, you can see I have one flange knuckle that sits very high (hard to see from the picture, but trust me it did).  Van's forming process on these ribs could be better.

What I decided to do is take my seamer and try to lower the location of the bend on the flange.  I put the seamer on the "back of the bend" of the flange and squeezed.  This sort of folded the bend over so that the bend was actually occurring a few millimeters lower on the rib web.  Then I took the seamer and ensured the flange was adjusted to 90 degrees to the web.  A little "tweaking" was all that was required.  This worked great to lower the rib flange knuckle.

I then took the the rib to the scotchbrite wheel and slightly took down the edges of the rib flange at that location.  As you can see in the picture below, the rib flange knuckle doesn't appear to sit as high.  On most of the ribs, I had to do this to the first knuckle on the top and bottom.

The picture below shows just another perspective.

As you can see, the amount of material I removed is very minimal but it made a huge difference when I put them back in the leading edge skin.  It did not take as much pressure with the cleco clamp to get the holes to line up.

Before I put the rib back in the leading edge, I rubbed the leading edge skin with my thumb and a fair amount of pressure to "massage" the bulge caused by rib flange out of the skin.  I was able to rub all but one of the bulges out.  The remaining bulge is barely noticeable, but I know it is there.  The casual observer would probably not ever notice it.

Additionally, I double checked the rib flanges to make sure they were at 90 degrees to the web and that the rib was straight.  I had to put a couple of more flutes in on 2 of the ribs to straighten them up.

ADVICE:  Look at your ribs/flanges closely before putting them in the skin the first time.  When fitting to the skin, If you have mis-alignment, don't try to force the cleco's in (a little pressure fine).  Additionally, do not prime these ribs until they have been fitted to the leading edge skin and everything fits okay.  Now I have to go back and do a little touchup on my ribs.

When I got all my bulges addressed and got the leading edge cleco'd back together, I cleco'd the leading edge to the main spar.  It really lines up well.  The picture below shows how the leading edge and main skins line up.  I doubt I could slip so much as a piece a paper between these two skins.