Match Drilling Ribs

On King’s day, my daughter (12 years) and I had a blast, match drilling all the ribs of both wings to the main and rear spar. This is the first time she helped me building the plane and we both enjoyed it. I’m really happy that I can share my enthusiasm of experimental plane building with her. Better still, she really likes to help and when we finished after four hours, she asked when we would continue. Only consequence is that we have a policy not to publish photos and videos of our children on the Internet, hence this time no video and very limited photos.

First step is clecoing all ribs to the main spar and rear spar. We were puzzled as some holes in the ribs didn’t line up with the ones in the spar. We tried and start doubting our work, but finally, when we read the rest of the section, it turned out that this is actually correct. Again I confirmed myself to FIRST read the entire section, before starting. Every time I think I do something wrong, it turns out I should have read the rest. I’m wondering when I will follow my own advise.

Step two is match drilling all the holes and drill several new holes in the ribs. In order to mount a conduit in the wings for the lights, we drilled an extra hole in the bottom of the ribs (see bottom left between the big lighting holes.

Last step is disassembling all the parts again, which seemed strange to my little girl, to deburr and prepare for priming.
We finished both wings and next time I can prime all the ribs for both wings. I’m not going to prime the fuel tank wings obviously.

Time: 4 Hours, Rivets: 0/0

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