Sunday, April 10, 2016

Section: 14
Hours: 7

I went to bed thinking about the construction manual note - "Bolts MUST be installed oriented exactly as shown". This morning I double checked the drawings and noticed that several of the inboard most ribs have the bolts heads on the opposite side or half and half. Luckily I hadn't torqued anything yesterday so it was easy to reverse the bolt orientations to match the drawing.

I torqued the bolts and then set the rather long AD4-5 and 7 rivets for the rib forward flanges. I put the manufactured heads on the rib flange for all but the most inboard rib. I started out using the long bent stick on the rivet gun to reach around the ribs, but quickly discovered the regular length rivet set would fit if I slightly pushed the rib out of the way and was much easier to control at 50 psi air pressure. I also discovered that the long RV-14 special bucking bar that I used on the elevator was the easiest bucking bar to hold onto for setting these rivets. It takes quite a heavy bucking bar to get these rivets to set before work hardening.

Starting from the inboard side, the top 4 and bottom 2 bolts are oriented with their heads on the spar doubler side to avoid interference with the fuel tank z brackets.

The 4 outboard ribs do not have bolts because the spar cap doubler does not extend that far.


The inboard rib has the torque tube assembly sticking out which made it impossible to get the rivet gun on that side so I put the shop heads on the flange.

Woody did a good job inspecting the bolt ups.

I completed the bolt ups and forward rib flange riveting on the right wing (foreground) and the left wing (background) today.

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