Section: 16
Hours: 5

Today was spent finishing the prep work on the upper wing skins. The wing skins have a slightly rough edge from the manufacturing process. I file all the edges and then polish using the small 3M wheel in the die grinder.

After finishing the edges there is a whole lot of dimpling to do. One of the biggest time consuming parts of dimpling is aligning the hole with the dimple die hundreds of times in a work session.

Another RV14 builder added a laser sight to his DRDT2 dimpling frame and I was considering doing the same. You can purchase laser cross hair components and it would be a simple circuit to construct- just a battery, switch, couple resisters... Then I started thinking about having to replace batteries, mounting, ordering, etc. and realized that was overkill.

Here is my simple mechanical hole finder. It consists of a short piece of insulated copper wire with a jewelry bead epoxied to the end. The whole affair is attached with some 100mph duct tape and can be easily adjusted using simple finger pressure.

I adjust the bead so it floats close to the edge of where the dimple die pin is located. When the piston is lowered, the bead gets pushed to the side and snaps back to position when the piston is raised.  The wire is flexible enough so that I can easily move the wing skin around, but as I get close to aligning the next hole the bead accurately indicates where the pin is. This simple device easily doubles my dimpling speed.

Dimpling in action.

Woody looking for missed dimples. Today was a good day- he didn't find any.