"Maybe I'm Amazed"

The middle of June brought Mark to the point that he thought he would be at at the beginning of the summer. . . the major assembly of the wing kit. He began with riveting the aft spars together and then quickly moved onto work with the wing ribs. He pulled out the band saw and made the cuts on the ribs that were needed. He confided in me later that he thought it a strange mix where some of the 28 forward ribs had the aft flange trimmed off while others have some forward flanges trimmed. He even did the same for all 26 of the aft or main ribs as well. Just a foreshadowing of the work that was to come on these suckers.  The replacement pieces for the hinges came in and prior to assembly, he filed down the four countersunk rivets before squeezing them. All worked out perfectly.

The next five days (7/15-7/19) turned out to be all that Mark ever hoped it would be. He spent close to 40 hours happily doing the following:

1. Deburring the holes on the one side of the rib where they were rough (it must have something to do with which way the sheet aluminum got folded into the rib as some of them needed the inside holes done and some were the outside)

2. Running a hand file on the lightening holes. This was particularly loathsome on the forward ribs as the stamping dies must have been pretty tired when ours were done. There were some serious rough parts that needed lots of hand filing due to the small openings.

3. Time to work with the Scotch Brite wheel while wearing goggles, ear plugs, and a face mask.

4. Using a hand file and the edge tool, often then taking off any rough spots that were missed or created.

5. Roughing up with the Scotch Brite pads while doing a final smoothing of the edges.

6.  Moving inside to the kitchen sink to clean with soap and another Scotch Brite pad and then hand dry. (good thing we have a LARGE kitchen sink and I wasn't trying to make dinner at the same time!)

7. One final wipe with MEK to get rid of the hand grease.

8. PRIME!

9. Discussion every evening about how glad we are that Mark decided to build an RV12 and NOT some sort of aluminum bi-plane!

Once the work on the ribs was completed Mark match drilled the ribs that accept doublers and hinge brackets and then riveted the doublers on using pulled rivets. Then, just because it would be the start of a very large construction,he riveted the first main rib onto the main spar!