6 Jul 2025 - 4 hours

Here's the end state from yesterday. I felt like this was a very easy step this time, getting the tank attachment strip fit between the rib and the skin. Last time, it took lots of work and a hammer. Looks like Van's has updated the kit to prepunch these parts and the rib has a new part number which makes this whole bit take about 3 minutes versus hours having to fit and drill all the holes in the rib and strip.

Today, I started on the fuel tank section of the instructions. The first step is "rivet the nut plates to the tank brackets", but there's quite a bit of work in that statement. I match drilled the holes, deburred them, and then cleaned and primed the brackets. Then I clecoed the nutplates to the brackets as you see here:

Now the rivets are all set.

I also riveted the inboard nutplates to the spar. The nutplate goes below the spar and the top side is countersunk for the rivet. It is pretty tough to get the bucking bar on the rivet tail and then it occurred to me to back rivet them which worked much better.

Then I found the tank skin stiffeners but ran out of time to do any work on them so that will be next on the agenda.