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Kupe's Zodiac 650B
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Date:  5-22-2013
Number of Hours:  2.00
Manual Reference:  6-W-8
Brief Description:  Nose Skin, Bottom Side

Woke up this morning and performed a quick leveling of the wing assembly (the usual). Next, pulled the nose skin from its storage spot on the floorof the garage against the wall. The nose skin is a lot easier to handle solo than the top and bottom skins!

I placed the bottom edge of the nose skin onto the nose ribs (the wing is upside down right now so the nose skin is resting on the bottom side) allowing the top edge of the nose skin to hand over the side of the bench. Some back and forth to center the skin then a lot of measuring, nudging, and testing to make sure the center of the bend in the nose skin matches the previously marked nose rib tips. This was challenging and I won't know for sure I was doing it right until I flip the wing over and fold the top side down over the ribs.

Side to side alignment was good and it was fairly straightforward to line up the nose rib flange center lines under the pre-drilled pilot holes in the skin. The "rib nudgers" used for the rear ribs came in handy here too. Everything was pretty much ops normal.

The biggest challenge was nose rib #4 which will support the outboard end of the fuel tank. The spanwise width of the fuel tank varies with the normal (12 gal) tank being narrower than the long-range (15 gal) option. Since the Zenith factory doesn't know which size fuel tank will be used when they produce a batch of nose skins, they don't pre-drill pilot holes for nose rib #4. I measured out a rivet line over nose rib #4 based on the nearby nose rib #5. When I first drilled it out, I was careful to only drill through the skin and not the rib flange so that I ended up with my own, home-brewed plot holes. From that point, it was a simple matter of lining up the centerlines through my pilot holes to drill through the flanges.

Lastly, I assembled a 14' long piece of 3" PVC to fit through the forward lightening holes of the rear ribs to help in flipping the wing back over.
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"Bottom" edge of the nose rib drilled out and clecoed. Note the landing light cut out lines.

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Another view of the nose skin. Note the long gap between ribs - that's for the fuel tank.

Another view of the nose skin. Note the long gap between ribs - that's for the fuel tank.

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My 14' long 3

My 14' long 3" PVC pip threaded through the forward lightening holes. Next I'm installing a pulley.

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