A time to reflect and be thankful

Earlier this week was the 16th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in North America. I say North America vs. New York and Washington because even though these are the locations of the actual attacks, they had profound impacts all over North America including here in Canada.

I'm not going to go into a long story about where I was, or what I remember, but I think it's important to remember what happened that morning and how lucky we are to have the freedom to pursue what makes us happy, despite the efforts of others in the world who turn to terror in the furtherance of their beliefs.  You can see more of my thoughts in a video I posted on my Facebook page.

Okay, time to move onto happy thoughts!

Spent a fair amount of time in the shop this week.  Managed to get a bunch of parts cut out and ready for bending.

Flapperon ribs

Marked for relief hole drilling

The fast and easy way to separate wing nose ribs for final cutting. Put the large traced sheet in the bending brake and use my new knife to make several scoring passes then....

.... gently bend the aluminum away from the score line and -snap-.... simple and effective.

Twelve wing nose ribs, final cut and awaiting corner relief hole drilling and final shape grinding. I'm going to wait to drill the tooling holes until I see if Ron's wing forms match up.

This week I also spent some time in the wood shop prepping my plywood forms for final sizing.  The scroll saw is excellent for this fine work:

The important part is to make sure both sides of the forming block pairs match.  So I started by cutting and sanding one side to perfect size, then used it as the guide for making the second the same size.

The elevator tip rib forming blocks stacked on each other it's easy to see where the bottom one still needs to be shaped to match the top one.

I didn't get all of them done in this session, but a got a good start.  I focused on the ones I need for the horizontal stab and elevator, the current section I'm working on.  I think I'm going to wait on the others and see if these work well and what improvements may be needed before cutting out the others.

I still need to router the round bending edge and bevel each for springback, but real happy how these turned out.

That's it for today's update.  There isn't really any easy way to capture all the work that goes into these but I hope this blog is somewhat east to follow along with.  If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask by leaving a comment below.

Heading south today to go check out an inventory of parts that a gentleman has in a barn.  It looks like I may be able to pick up some hardware for my build and possibly for Ron too.  More details to come!