Jason builds a plane

scared to open this up further

19/6/2017

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As I work away on the repair of the 701 wing I'm caught in a bit of a conundrum.

The spar cap repair I'm ready to rivet is all fit and ready to go, but in order to solid rivet the spar cap inside the nose skin, I need to take that nose skin off in order to have the room required for the rivet gun.  Not a huge deal and not difficult to do, but as with everything else in this repair, we're scared to discover more of the original builders follies.

The other side of the coin however is do we want to take that chance?  Forego opening the nose skin section and we might miss something important, but we can't leave it in place if we expect to complete the spar cap repair.  Eventually the MDRA inspector will need to see inside the wings anyhow, so off it comes.

First steps, drill out all the nose skin rivets on the bottom edge and rib noses:
Picture
Picture

Gently unroll the nose skin which can very easily be creased when not secure:
Picture

Thankfully it came apart very easy.  It actually looks decent and proper inside.  Some minor issues with rivet lines on the nose ribs, but certainly better than what we've seen so far.

With the nose open, I finished solid riveting the spar root doubler.  Nice to see this part close to being done - really happy how it turned out, the solid rivets are not too difficult to set:
Picture

I also finish riveted the spar cap repair.  It too turned out real nice:
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While all this has been going on, I've been working on printing and cutting out the templates I need to make my forming blocks and shaped aluminum blanks for my 750 build.  It was lot of work but now I can start cutting and bending metal for my project!
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Just a few of the many scale templates I've printed and cut out of card stock, all with plan/part number printed on them for reference. Some of these will be traced onto the aluminum sheet, and some will be used to trace out the plywood forming blocks.

Next up, continue the 701 wing repair (almost there!) and start tracing out the parts for my 750 horizontal stabilizer.
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    Husband, father and 911 dispatcher.  Long time pilot with a licence that burns a hole in my pocket where my student loan money used to be.  First time aircraft builder. Looking to fly my own airplane.

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