Made a start on the outboard panel today. We had cleco'd the two rows of rivets where the skin overlaps and then a few others along the panel to hold it in place overnight. We were about to start riveting and removed all the cleco's apart from the skin overlap cleco's and to my dismay the outboard end of the skin was out of alignment by over one quarter inch; as if the weight of the skin pivoting at one end allowed the other end to drop. So we cleco'd the whole skin back on and found that with the cleco's in everything aligned just right. Hmm. Right; having decided the weight of the skin itself was the culprit we removed the wing from the stand and placed it on the work table. Skin won't 'hang' down now as it will be laying flat. We removed all the cleco's and found it was still out of alignment. After much head scratching, we decided that with the skin on everything gets pulled properly into alignment, just like the horizontal stab when we built that. So we got on with it. We cleco'd a little way down the outboard skin overlap/join and then along the rear spar to the '1st' rib. After that, we cleco'd the rest of the skin back down again since the remaining rivets in the first two bays we can reach through the access panel (though we will need to put the wing back in the stand for that). Once the first two bays are completely done, the rest should pull into alignment just fine. Yep, it may well be the long way to go about it, but we're well used to the assemble/disassemble routine so this is just more of the same. We'd like to have this skin done by the end of next week if we can.
