Section 23 Started

The weather made it impossible today to even think of spraying anything out in the open. We had a 30mph wind with gusts above 40mph. You could see the dust clouds drifting down the valley. As I don't have an indoors spraying area, I had to cancel my plans of finishing the seats this weekend. The primer has to dry over night before I can apply a coat of paint and with losing the Saturday for the priming I just don't have enough time.
As the wind was also too uncomfortable for working outside on the fuel lines, I had the choice of either canceling all the work for the weekend or to look for something else to do.
I was afraid of the longerons after reading in other blogs how dreadful their experience was. I read a lot of broken vises and hours of useless banging with heavy mallets on the poor piece of angle. Way back when I had ordered my first part of the kit, I had already figured that my existing 4" cast iron vise will have no chance of survival and so I had done some research and ordered a Wilton 676, a 6.5" steel utility vise which is rated for 30000 psi clamping pressure. You can never have too many tools but in this case the only reason to get this heavy duty vise was for opening the angle of the longerons. Now, 9 month later I finally put it to work and I have to say I am impressed!

First I started by precisely measuring all the different lengths and writing them onto the longerons. Different colors for different tasks. I copied the markings onto the right side longeron making sure I produced a mirror image and not a mere copy.


I was pleasantly surprised that the length over which the angle has to get opened was relatively short. And at this time I believe that this is the worst part of the job. Maybe not ...


After cutting the longerons to length and deburring and polishing the cut it was time to put it in the vise ...


I lent the aluminum pipe holding brackets from the other vise and used some pieces of wood to level them to the correct height and kept them there with duct tape. The pipe coupling I used is a 3/8" one of which I have sawed off the threadings as I was concerned they'd imprint into the aluminum under pressure. I deburred the cut and broke the edge. I used a 3/8" size coupling because I wanted to open the angle from the inside rather than just bent the outside edges of the angle as the point of contact with the pipe is where the force will be applied.
Here's a photo showing the alignment from the side.


So far I have worked on one longeron and I have the whole area opened to about 5.2 degrees with just a bit more than comfortable hand pressure on the handle. Tomorrow I will use a hard rubber mallet to drive the handle just a bit further for the last 0.2 degrees.
Without all the preparation, thinking and setup, the actual opening job took about 45 minutes and I didn't break a sweat. I think the $90 I put into the purchase of this vise was very well invested money.