Brief Description: Top panel laps, layout bottom panel
Note: The actually date for this was 11/25. I had to change the date to manipulate sequencing for multiple daily logs on 11/26.
Put a full day in today. I completed the top panels trimming at the spar and drilling the overlaps. Then I laid out the spar drilling line and bottom skin overlap. I'm not drilling yet just planning the bottom skin.
I'm using John Rheney's idea of a plastic sheet to lay out the bottom skin. I bought a 40" x 50' roll of .005 Grafix Clear-Lay plastic film from an art supply store some time ago for this. It works great. I taped the plastic sheet into position and laid out the ribs and the inspection hole location. This allows you to visualize the holes before cutting the aluminum sheet. I liked this because I really had a sense of where the hole was. I actually made adjustments to every hole until it felt just right. I'll sleep on it and take another look tomorrow.
A lot of my day was just looking things over and making sure everything is going right.
I also started planning for my inspection holes, covers and backing rings. Glenn Patterson did his inspection port parts with a router and I'm going to try the same. He gave me some good guidance on how he did it.
I drew the 5-1/2" X 5-1/2" cover with a CAD program then glued the sheet on a piece of MDF. I cut it out on the band saw and sanded it to the line on a belt sander. The aluminum blank is held in position on the jig for routing with some double sided tape.
I believe Glenn did his on a table router but I decided to mount my jig on a piece of plywood and clamp it to the table and use a hand held router. I made one as a test piece - looks good so far I'll play with is some more tomorrow.
