My Vans shipment came in while I was on vacation with the family. The leading edge ribs I needed were in this shipment, these are the ones that will replace the ribs that had the edge distance issue from where I mis-drilled them. I also had some proseal, 50ft of nylon conduit and a few other things I wanted to pick up; including the Vans lighted sign 🙂 I’ll build that later, dont want to use up my time on the RV-7 building the sign.

First things first: In this shipment was one of my missing K1000-3 nutplates that I needed on the aft spar web of the right wing, so I spent a few minutes riveting that nutplate on using the back rivet method. Once I had that done, I needed to get these new ribs ready to be used. That meant straightening the flanges, and fluting them, deburring, and all that good stuff. So, like so many posts ago, I set about deburring the edges of the ribs using my bench grinder, and then a combination of scotchbrite, sanding paper and emory cloth to get all the tiny gaps in the flanges. Then I used a deburring tool and a scotchbrite to deburr the edges of the lighening holes. Once they were nice and smooth, I used this handy tool I made a while back to get the flanges to 90 degrees.

Then it was time to do some fluting to get all the warping out from the forming process. I outline this in detail in previous posts, but here I am using my wifes granite countertop as my flat surface to check the fluting process against:

You can see a big difference! The top pic is after its been fluted and all corrected. Once I had them all straight and ready to go, I marked the centerlines of the flanges so I could line them up with the prepunched holes in the leading edge skin to make sure I got the correct edge distance, then I back drilled into the ribs using the skin as a guideline.

It’s not 100% perfect, but its close, and there is plenty of edge distance now, so I am happy with the outcome. I tossed the old ribs into my scrap bucket, maybe I’ll find a use for them in the future? I then removed the ribs and the reinforcement plate and deburred the holes on both the rib and the plate. I’ll leave these parts off for now, because I need to alodine them before final assembly.

I wanted to get a little more work done, so back to the tanks! It’s time to make the tank attach brackets. I separated the T-407 and T-410 from the assembly so I could work on them. Then I deburred all the edges of these parts on the bench grinder / scotchbrite wheel and labeled them for each fuel tank.

That was it for this session. Here’s another pic of me, to show I am the guy building the airplane:

And heres an album of all this sessions photos. I’m headed out to meet some friends for dinner with Acacia and Tammy, and if I get back in time tonight, I’ll continue working. Next up will be to make the heavy tank attach brackets.

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Google Photos Link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hUMoEMcm4FR6FEYB9

Hours Worked: 3.25

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