February 5, 2006

A nice long day at the hangar. My first task was to put nutplates on the inboard wing ribs for the fuselage skin and the wing root fairings. This took me forever! I haven’t got a nutplate jig for this size of nutplate, which is a complete pain, so I had to use an actual nutplate as a drilling guide. Slow going to say the least.

I got the wing root fairings match drilled too.

Here’s the wing root nutplates. It’s not too convenient dimpling through three layers of aluminium either. My back was killing me after this little exercise.

Time to put the pitot tube on. I soldered the wires to the terminals and put them into the terminal block for the pitot. Then threaded it all through. The pitot uses a local earth here. No point in having a high current wire running all through the plane. I bought some stainless scres to hold all this together too. I should probably get some stainless screws for the pitot tube to mount attachment too. I think my next task for the wings will be to put nutplates on the access cover holes. I would’ve done it today, but I’d had enough nutplates for one day!