February, 1997. Construction resumed. As of the beginning of March, both wing spars have ribs drilled. Trying to figure out how to prime everything during a Minnesota winter.
September, 1997. The wings are beginning to look like wings. They skeleton is all drilled and clecoed together. Some riviting is complete, but I have more work to do before I complete riviting the skeleton. I've drilled the main skins on one wing and will have the other wing's skins drilled in another day or two.
February, 1998. I had hoped to finish the wings in early 1988, but work hasn't been steady. The wings are now mostly ready to rivet, but not quite. I had my EAA tech advisor out. I prepped him by telling him a made some mistakes and was expecting him to tell me to redo some work. It turns out that my mistakes weren't as bad as I thought, but he did suggest I reorder 5 ribs on one wing, as I had badly missed edge distances and had made a couple of other mistakes. He also looked at some of my tools and told me to get a different rivet set for my rivet gun, as the one I had was causing me bad problems.
August 1998. The wings look like wings, mostly. I'm working on the fuel tanks.
January, 2002. I haven't been working very much on the airplane. Other things have gotten in the way. But I've found new drive. The wings themselves just need a little more dimpling and some priming, then I can rivet them. I've worked on the flaps for the last day or so -- had a little oopsie, but worked out a solution. I expect to have everything riveted and flaps and ailerons mounted to the wings by the end of February. Let's see how I do.
February 17, 2002. I've done as much on the flaps as I can until I can get them primed. Larry Mills, another RV builder, has a paint booth in his hanger he said I could use.
One of the problems I had earlier was a little oopsie when working on the landing lights. I have the duckworks type. I did the first one, then cut out the hole for the second one exactly the same. EXACTLY the same, when it should be a mirror image. Oops. This was three years ago. Sigh. Today, I finished the fix: cut the hole even bigger, reform the lense to fit the larger hole, and keep going.
I'm not happy with the fit of the lens. I'll probably end up doing both lenses over sometime in the future. But before going to bed tonight, I finished riveting the second outboard leading edge to the main spar.
Time to think about pictures of everything.
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