A BUSIER MONTH THAN I THOUGHT

Can't believe it's been over a month since I posted to the blog.  The second half of October and first couple of weeks of November have escaped us.   Unfortunately, I felt like I had't gotten anything done in that time, but going through my photos, I see there is more done than I thought.

I had to go away for a week due to work, but I decided to make good use of my evenings in the hotel.  I took my wing rib blanks and final sanded them as I watched TV.  Got some laughs and strange looks from my co-workers when I told them I was building an airplane in my hotel room!

When I cut out the rib blanks the bandsaw kinda chewed up the inside corners of the ribs:

So when I got home and back to the shop I came up with a jig for cleaning these up.  I drilled a slightly larger hole in a scrap piece of wood and set the sanding drum up on the drill press to fit inside.  This gave me a working surface almost like an inverted router:

The sanding drum cleaned up the corners really nice and I finished them off by hand sanding.

On preparation for finish bending of the tail group pieces, I had to drill the tooling holes in the forms.  Best clamp them together evenly and drill each on the press:

All the tail group forming blocks ready,

When I tool out the tail group blanks, I noticed that I still needed to add the second tooling holes to many of them:

To save time and ensure accuracy, I decide to drill the stack of blanks together, using the available tooling hole as a reference point.  A bolt and wing nut held the stack together and a form block and clamp were used to place the tooling hole accurately:

With the tooling holes established, the second bolt is added as well as the back half of the forming block.  Here is an elevator rear rib bolted up and ready for bending:

The whole sandwich is mounted in the vice:

A soft faced (plastic) dead-blow hammer is used to round the aluminum over the edge of the forming block until flat:

Remove the form block and voila!  My first formed part for my airplane! YAY!

Four of these ribs are required, so repeat the process 3 more times.  Two left and two right complete:

I'm real happy how these turned out.  They are pretty simple compared to some of the other parts in the tail group, but they are nice and straight, so my efforts to make the form blocks accurate paid off.

The next thing I wanted to do was get more of the thicker parts traced and cut out.  Ron figured a 2 x 2 sheet of 0.125 aluminum would suffice for the parts I needed.

The sheet comes from the supplier covered in a thin plastic covering on both sides which is a pain to remove:

This particular piece of aluminum had been sitting around the shop for a while and fell victim to a few scratches and dings.  Once I cleaned off the rest of the plastic and adhesive residue I circled any areas of concern and got to work tracing out the parts, nesting them as best as I could, starting with the flapperon arms:

Eventually I managed to fit 25 pieces on the sheet.  It's tough to know the absolute best layout to minimize waste, but I'm only missing a couple of pieces which can be done later:

That's it for this update.  Next up, more 701 wing extension work, bending more tail group parts and rough cutting the 0.125 parts.