I finished clecoing and riveting the middle skin onto the skeleton today. The skin is pretty narrow and so it didn't take me long to finish this. I was very careful during riveting that I wouldn't press down too hard and when I had to I countered the push with my free hand pushing upwards from below to counter the load and avoid any warp to the wing.
I removed all leftover clecos from the rest of the wing to get it ready to get turned on its belly for when my wife comes home.
Turning the wing over with her help was pretty easy although I was a bit concerned about the overall weight of the wing by now. It really is not such a lightweight structure any more!
Doesn't it look beautiful? I think it does!
Now, I didn't want to let the forward part of the skins sit like this and I was worried about some deformation due to the weight. So I had to tackle this hurdle, too. It took a while but with these tiedown straps it was practically a cakewalk.
Just make sure you're going slow and add the tension evenly and pull down onto a rib to avoid bending the skin.
This is how I pulled down inboard and outboard skins and put the clecos in to hold them down. The middle skin I just clecoed down loosely as I want to get back at the stall warner to do the fine adjustment which I believe to be necessary. And I really want to avoid having to do this through that tiny access hatch on the bottom the wing.
The rest of the evening I spent preparing the top skins by removing the vinyl from the rivet lines. I can smell Cortec-440 coming up soon!
I also did a sum of the recently worked hours. Section 15 for the left wing added up to 37.5 hours, Section 16 which I consider to be done as the last step for the right wing won't take more than 5 minutes, came out at 6.5 hours and Section 17 had me working 20.5 hours so far. That all sums up to a total of 278.0 hours to this day.
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