11 May 2025 - 5 hours
Today was a big day for progress on the plane, and not only because I finished deburring the wing ribs! I also had great weather and got motivated to spray some primer on the rear spars. I did the doubles a few weeks ago but just used canned primer. I wanted to use the good stuff on the spars because they are so big, it would have taken probably multiple cans to cover them.Anyway, I sprayed them outside and they came out great! I set the pressure to 55 or 60 psi (at least on my pressure gauge) and the results were quite good!
It was warm enough that it dried in about 3 minutes which was nice, so I moved onto clecoing the doublers in place and then marking the holes that don't get rivets right now with tape. I started setting the rivets which are all the thicker -4 rivets with the pneumatic squeezer, but it was just barely able to set the 4-4s and couldn't get the longer ones so I switched to the hand squeezer and it went very smoothly!
Here's the rear spars with the doublers riveted on.
As mentioned earlier, I finally finished up the deburring of all the wing ribs, so I moved on at this point to squaring up the flanges and then fluting the ribs to make them flat again after they warped in the forming process.
Here is a before shot of the ribs showing their potato-chipiness.
And the after shot with the ribs sitting much more flat like they are supposed to.
