Today, was all about drilling holes. I didn't plan on drilling all day long, but that is how it turned out.  I had to back track a little and re-drill a new root rib z-bracket.  I accidentally drilled the original root rib z-bracket for plate nuts.  As soon as I drilled it, I realized my mistake.  Anyway, I needed to re-mount the leading edge and fuel tank so that I could finish drilling the W-423 joint plate to the fuel tank so I guess I am going to kill two birds with one stone here.

In the picture below, I drilled the fuel tank skin to joint plate holes with a #19 drill bit.  I then used the black clecoes to hold it together.  This process was pretty straightforward.

After I finished drilling the new root rib z-bracket and the fuel tank to joint plate holes, I then began the long process of drilling all the holes in the leading edge to final size (#40).

I also final drilled the fuel tank holes to final size with the tank still on the spar.  Leaving the tank on the spar, made for easy access to all of the fuel tank holes.  This is in contrast to Van's instructions.  I DID NOT, however, drill any of the holes for the tank skin to rear tank baffle while the tank was still mounted on the wing.  I didn't want to accidently drill into the main spar.  To finish those holes, I removed the tank from the wing spar and set it in the cradle.  Again, this was straight forward and just took a while to drill what must be some 400+ holes.

Then it was on to drilling the holes that will be used to attach the tank to the main spar plate nuts.  The instructions has you drill the holes out to #19.  The tank skin is not supported by anything around these mounting holes so when you try to run the drill bit through the holes, all it wants to do is chatter.  Before I "bugered" (scientific term ya know) up any holes, I clamped a 1" x 3" piece of scrap wood to the tank skin.  This worked great and only took a couple of seconds to clamp to the skins.

After what felt like drilling for an eternity, I began fabricating the fuel tank stiffeners.  Since the fuel tanks can hold over 120 pounds of fuel (each), the skins are re-inforced on the bottom side of the tank.  It is hard to tell in the picture, but there are 4 different sizes of stiffeners in the tank.  I thought that maybe Van's made a mistake because it looked like there were only two different distinct rib spacing in the tank.  When I went to install the stiffeners, sure enough there are 4 different rib spacing dimensions in the fuel tank.  it was very subtle.

Believe it or not, this took me a good 9+ hours to get this done.  Tomorrow, I think that I will try to debur and dimple the leading edge.  I think that I may finish the leading edge before tackling the tank.  Decisions, decisions...