Today’s session started to focus on the Forward and Center Bottom Skins and parts that get attached to them. Let me start by saying, you have to pay VERY close attention to the plans while working on these Skins in this section.....some steps are for trigear version and some steps are for tailwheel version and some steps are for both versions! I read, re-read, and re-read again to make sure I was doing it correctly.....we will see how well I follow directions.
To start, here are the F-01483-L & -R Forward Bottom Skins. After skipping all the way to Step #10 (first 9 are for the trigear version), two little #40 holes get dimpled on each Skin (circled below).....
.....and these five #40 holes on the F-01484 Center Bottom Skin get dimpled in Step #11. Again, you have to pay very close attention to the plans.....look at all those holes in the Skin just daring you to dimple them!!!!!
Moving on to the F-14140 Skin Stiffeners. As with most all of these type of parts, they came all connected in one piece and had to be separated.....in this case into six Stiffeners. The six Stiffeners below and been cleaned, dimpled and ready to be treated with Alumiprep, Alodine and Akzo primer.
These are the two F-01443 Center Section Lower Doublers. The upper two rows and lower two rows on each piece had to be machine countersunk to fit a dimpled #30 Skin. Again, you have to pay attention to the orientations of the parts. If you notice, the inside upper edges of each piece has a 96º corner vs a 90º for the other three.....subtle, but definitely different!
Here is an excerpt from the plans that shows where these parts will be attached to the Center Bottom Skin.
The next step in the plans is to dimple all the #30 and #40 holes in the Center Bottom Skin (except where previously noted otherwise). Since the Skin is so big, I started the process dimpling the holes I could reach with a 3” yoke on my pneumatic squeezer. This will obviously be the holes around the edges of the Skin. Once that is complete, I will dimple the remaining holes with the DRDT-2.
I’ve dimpled less that 10% of the holes on this Skin, so will pick it up from here on the next session.