Well, there it is. The right wing leading edge section all riveted on! With the left wing on as well, it's time to move on with riveting the top skins on. There are four wing skins per wing, two on top and the rest below. We won't need the bottom skins for a while, but I decided that while we were match drilling, deburing and dimpling the top we might as well do the bottom skins as well. There are hundreds of rivets in the skins so it doesn't take much imagination to see how boring this process can be. I'll bet you're experiencing bit of that right now! Fortunately, Carol came down to help out with a lot of it.
One thing that I found helpful during the tedious parts is to listen to the radio or podcasts online. I really like a podcast called Big Picture Science. It's funny and informative. Give it a try.
So we finished most of the boring parts and I moved on to the scarf joints. These are sections of overlap between the skins that would end up too thick if left alone. So matching tapers are cut into the top of the skin below and the bottom of the skin above. The idea is to try to maintain the same thickness of a single skin where the two overlap. In this case, it is only necessary to scarf the corner of the sheet where a third skin abuts (fuel tank skin along the main spar).
To cut the tapers I used a vixen file, then just a small amount of sanding to smooth.
Meanwhile, Carol continues the deburring... Ok, so we weren't quite finished with the boring parts.
The edges of the skin are fairly rough as delivered. The high spots come right off with the vixen file. Then the edges can be dressed with a smooth mill file or Scotch-Brite pad.
There probably won't be many pictures of the top skin riveting process as it takes both of us to accomplish. I did manage to snap this one while Carol examines the work. The process goes like this: I shoot and she bucks. Which means that I place a rivet into a hole and put the rivet gun with a flat set over the rivet. She sees the rivet coming through from the other side and says ready when her bucking bar is in place over the rivet. Then I give it a short burst with the 3x rivet gun. She then evaluates the rivet and says good. Or she says give it another tap. Or, my least favorite outcome, she just says oops! In the latter case the rivet is drilled out and the process repeated.
Thus far, we have completed the inboard top skins on the left and right wings. On the first skin, we had 3 rivets that had to be redone. On the second, none. Also, the second only took half as long to complete. So we are improving. Yeah!
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