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Todd's Web site
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Date: 1-26-2008
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Number of Hours: 6.70
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Left Wing #33 - Riveted outboard bottom skin
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Messed around with the pitot mast some more. SafeAir doesn't call for any kind of doubler plate, but it seamed just a little flimsy to me. So I probably thought about it too much and over-engineered something to help. I went ahead fabricated a columnar type support that attaches under the aft outboard rivet of the mast plate and connect to the adjacent rib. It secured everything to my satisfaction.
John came over again today and helped me close up the left wing. Before installing the final skin, I used the soldering iron to put a hole in the coduit to allow the wires for the heated pitot to exit the conduit. Pulled two strings through the conduit and taped them down. One goes to the wingtip, the other comes out of the hole. Installed a nice grommet in the hole. So hopefully it should be easy to pull those wires through later.
Set all the rivets in the outboard skin. Didn't have a singe oops rivet, but I had a few panic moments towards the end. I don't know if had to do with fatigue or not, but the bucking bar jumped out my hand a few times when I was stretching to hold it. It's a sickening feeling to hear that thing fall down onto the inside of the top wing skin. Luckily, no damage was done to the top. But had one mishap on the main spar that worries me some. The bar jumped out of control in my hand. It didn't fall, but it got crooked and a corner of the bar got hammererd into the spar flange and bottom skin. Absolutely sickening feeling. Anyway, I was able to work the skin to a very slight cosmetic spot that will be difficult at best to spot once painted. The spar was marked and dented very slightly....I figure I'll ask Van's about it while I visit them in a few weeks. That's right...I'm going to Vans!!! Actually, I'm going TDY to the Portland ANG Base for a week, but the last day there I'll be able to drive down to Aurora and visit the factory. I'm pretty happy about that.
Anyway, none of the pictures I took that day survived my fat fingering that night on the computer. Somew
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Kind of hard to get the view right, but here's the columnar support for the mast.
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One each skinned left wing
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