Leading Edge

So, for you non-airplane folk, you should *hopefully* be able to appreciate that this thing is starting to resemble a wing. The leading edge is temporary installed on the wing. Right now I'm just working on the left wing. I ran out of celco's. When I ordered my initial tool kit, it came with 325 of the silver ones. I've ordered 100 since then, and now I've ordered another 300. So I will have over 700. Once I'm done with the wings, I'm not sure what I'll do with all of them. Perhaps people will start getting handfuls of them for christmas presents. I'm sure you'll thank me later.


Here is another shot of the wing. The missing section of the wing is the fuel tank. from the exterior it looks exactly the same, with the exception of the fuel cap. The interior is quite a bit different. The fuel tanks are coming up very shortly.


If you look at the first picture in this post, you can see there is a rib missing. This rib get installed by itself. It doesn't have any holes pre-punched. The reason they do this is there is a small plate that gets installed between the rib and the skin (you'll see later).

The first step is to just place the rib in its location and mark off the holes that already exist in the skin, so you know where to flute it.

You then flute between the holes.


Here is the plate that gets installed. Its basically just a strip of aluminum. A line is drawn per plans so that you can line up the strip in the correct spot. Notice all the precision measuring devices, etc. Those are purely for the illusion to convince people I know what I'm doing.


Its hard to see the strip, but its in between the ribs and the skin. And you can see clamping is key. This is ready to be drilled.