Saturday, December 26, 2015

Deburring and straightening wing ribs - 12 hours



Huge day on the plane, however not a whole lot of forward progress. I worked purely on deburring all the wings ribs and bending the flanges to 90 degrees.
First I broke all the edges and holes with files. Overall the ribs were in good shape but some had shear marks that needed to be taken out. So every rib  god a good once over with files. Then every nook and cranny had a once over with a file of some type.

Then a cleaned up all the edges (Except for the nooks and crannies) with the Scotchbrite wheel on the die grinder for the holes, and the bench grinder for all the other edges.

I then set up the straightener and dove in. I used a square to check 90deg instead of placing the rib against a 90deg surface as I found it was much easier to tell what was square, and what wasn't.


The wing ribs themselves are in pretty good shape, but all the leading edge ribs needed lot's of work.
Very labor intensive, and my hands are sore. But I'm crusing along!