Wings: Ribs. Deburring, dimpling and other stuff.

This marks the 54 hours mark.  Not much to show for all that time.  Nothing that looks like an airplane, that's for  sure.

I continued prepping the ribs by finishing up the #40 hole deburring and starting their dimpling.  For the holes, I was originally using the hand deburring tool but it didn't seem to be taking the burrs away.  So I ran over the holes with 400 grit sandpaper.  That was taking away the burrs quite nicely, but it was a lot of manual labor.  Turns out that handy 3M Scotch-Brite Fine-Finishing Sander was perfect for the job.  You could hear the burrs "ticking" off the flanges.  Plus, it's like free scuffing in preparation for priming.

There were a number of self-inflicted scratches on the ribs which I needed to remove.  Here is one example "before" and "after".

 

Then I had to sand out some minor nicks from the factory in the spar.  I wish I took a "before" picture, but here is one area sanded with 400 grit and polished with 600 grit, prior to priming.

When it came time for dimpling the ribs, the plans call for only the lower flanges to be dimpled.  That seemed odd to me.  Why wouldn't you dimple the top flanges?  So I peeked ahead in the plans and found that in Section 16, page 16-02, you're asked to dimple the top flanges, but not on the inboard 4 ribs.  That's because those ribs support the wing walk doublers.  Thus, I decided to label those 8 ribs (4 each, left and right) and draw a line down their upper flanges to avoid accidentally dimpling them (pic below).  I could dimple the top and bottom properly since it's easier now with them off the spar than later with them on.  That took a while.

Then it was on to the torque tube support brackets.  Those had to be match drilled as a single structure, then again when on the ribs.  Here they are as separate assemblies.

And here the right one is on its rib.  It was extremely difficult to fit this into the rib.  In fact, I plan to pull it out and adjust things to get a smoother fit.  I'm concerned that I may have gouged the W-1010-L in the process, in which case I'll be buying another one.

You can see how it doesn't quite sit well in there.

Now, the left rib torque assembly bracket was impossible to fit.  Why?  Take a look below.  The W-1029A-L isn't properly shaped.  It's as though they bent it at the wrong locations to make the flanges.  This isn't something I can fix since the holes wouldn't line up with the ones in the ribs if I just somehow rebent it.  So Van's sent me a replacement part.