So my main goal for this week is to be at a point where I can prime the LE components this weekend, and I’m pretty much there. Tonight I started by working on the left tank attach strip. First I reamed the screw holes out to final size, then pulled the strip and dimpled the screw holes. Finally, I clecoed the nutplates on, drilled their rivet holes, and countersunk the holes for the NAS1097 attach rivets.
The attach strip with nutplates clecoed in place:
Next was a good old-fashioned deburring session, featuring the attach strip and all the ribs. Then I went back, dimpled all those parts, and peeled off the part ID stickers. And just like that, I have a big stack of ribs waiting for primer:
The only other part I really need to worry about is the doubler for the stall vane access plate. Since I’m not going to install the stall vane, my intention is to permanently rivet that access plate in place, but I’ll still need the doubler to get that done.
In other news, I’ve placed orders for my fuselage kit and for a set of Grove airfoil gear legs. I won’t be needing the legs any time soon, but Grove only does production runs a couple times a year, so I wanted to go ahead and get my name on the list. Turns out they’re just about to start a run of legs, so I should have mine in March…which won’t be too far behind when the fuse kit shows up. It might get interesting figuring out where to store all this stuff…