Preparing Side Skins

I didn't quite finish the next task of preparing the side skins but I got almost through. I deburred the longerons and touched up some scratches in the primer (knowing that it will likely get scratches in the same spots again). Then I cut off the little match-drilling template tab on the end of both side skin. That was tricky task as the cut will be visible on the finished plane and so I wanted to make sure that it would be a nice cut.
The tool of choice for a nice cut is the bandsaw but the skin is quite awkward to handle alone and I certainly didn't want to scratch the nice paint job either.
So I had to find a way to get the bandsaw close to a flat work bench.


The bandsaw on a bucket got me within 1 or 2 inches of the height of the skin and that was enough to work with. I got two nice straight cuts out it and deburred the edges of the cut.

Then I carefully broke the rear and bottom edges of both skins. I took my time with that to avoid to accidentally run the tool into the skin which happened with the tailcone skins once. That would have been really ugly. Didn't happen this time.
Then I dimpled the holes around the triangular cutout on both skins.


And before the end of the day I managed to spray some primer onto those pesky little parts that I had overlooked before and that need to get painted before they can be riveted in place.


So I didn't get to install the nutplates in the freshly dimpled holes around the triangular cutout but this will hopefully get done tomorrow night. After that I think I will be ready to cleco everything back in place.