Brief Description: Match drilling, fluting and dimpling
Progress is being made. Slowly, deliberately, but progress nonetheless.
I fluted the ribs to straighten them out. They didn't really need much fluting, but of course I was a little too agressive and had them bending in the opposite direction. Not by much though. I just turned the fluting pliers around and "de-fluted" them a little and ended up with reasonably flat ribs.
I finished match drilling all the ribs to the front and rear spars. The front spar and doubler received their respective dimples too. I used my skin dimple set on the front spar and then used the substructure dimple set on the doubler plate. The difference between the two is the substructure dimples go 0.007 in. deeper than the skin dimples. I've heard you don't really need these to build the plane, but it just makes the parts fit together a little bit better. I got mine from Cleaveland Tools.
The next step is to fit the support structure into the skin and cleko it together for match drilling. This requires careful positioning of the nose rib and tip closeout rib flanges to match the skin. If you force it here you could crease the skin. My initial fitting shows I have some work to do to get everything lined up properly, but I was getting a little tired so I decided to defer this to another day.
I like to make notes on the part to help keep me from doing something stupid.
Final match drilling of the vertical stabilizer support structure.
