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Jims RV-8
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Date:  6-13-2013
Number of Hours:  3.50
Manual Reference:  7-3
Brief Description:  drilling conduit holes

So tonight the wonderful wife calls from work and says she needs to stay late – no problem, I say – I will just keep working in the shop! So I was able to get a good block of time in tonight…

I finished off deburring the holes on the right wing main ribs that I had drilled from spar to rib – then I began the process of opening up holes in the rib for plumbing – wire runs, Angle of Attack instrument air tubes/power supply, wing tip lighting. The forward holes are “opened up” by drilling them with a unibit. They can be opened up to a maximum of 5/8”, so I did just that. I opened up the inboard 9 ribs to handle the AOA power and air supply. The other holes have to be drilled from scratch behind the first lightening hole in each rib and they can be drilled to a maximum of ¾”. However, I am also drilling it to 5/8” as I have found some light weight, straight (non-corrugated) conduit that I will run thru that hole (thru all of the ribs) from the root rib all the out to the tip rib to carry the wingtip lighting wires. (edit : see change in this thinking...)

The trick is to get all of the holes in all of the ribs to line up so that the previously mentioned “straight” conduit can run straight thru all of the ribs. The other trick is that some of the inboard ribs are shorter, due to the spar doubler. So, after “eye-balling” the correct spot that I wanted the finished hole to be located, I made a pattern out of one of the right ribs and then transferred that location to a left rib to use as a pattern also. Now that I had two pattern ribs, a left and a right, I could match those up with the remaining L/R ribs to drill them. I first tried to use a cardboard pattern to sit inside of the flanges but as mentioned, some of the ribs are different sizes due to the doubler close to the root of the wings. I found that the 2nd, 3rd, 4th lightening holes are symmetrical on all ribs whereas the first was not always. Luckily, I also found a roll of duct tape to hold the two ribs together for clamping
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roll of duct tape

roll of duct tape

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clamped and ready

clamped and ready

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drilled...

drilled...

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