December 8, 2003

One side is cleco'd, looking at the other side.  The red arrow points to an area where the rib was formed a bit wide.  Once both sides were fastened, the rib flange had made a minor ding in the skin.  Not too hard to fix, but something to watch for when fitting skins around pulling areas like the leading edge.

I didn't like the thought of putting pressure on the cleco's on one side while working on the other, so I cut a couple of 4x4's to about the same width of the table, and then put some carpet remnants on them to pad them.

Van's rule on ribs was "as long as you can get the holes to line up".  Well, if I took them in series, I was able to get them to line up with a little bit of help from a home-made alignment tool.

Both sides in position!

Rather than rip off the strips for dimpling, I went ahead and pulled all the blue plastic off.  Why?  Van's is now recommending that you pull off all plastic w/in a couple of weeks of receiving the parts.  There have been instances of corrosion occurring underneath the plastic.  I'm not too worried about scratches since I'm going to be painting it all anyways.  That's not to say that I won't try to minimize the scratches tho!

Getting ready to dimple the skins, which will mean I'm using the C-Frame for the first time!  Finally able to use all those tools that came in the Avery kit, lol.  I made a couple of platforms from scrap lumber to help keep the skin level while in the c-frame.  I'd originally planned to carpet them for padding, but that wound up being thicker than I wanted, so I bagged that idea.  I might tape down some butcher paper or something just to smooth them out.