The other outer spar

There was too few 470 5-9 rivets. If it is an error from Sonex or if ACS has put a finger on the scale I don't know. Luckily I have a rivet cutter so I took a few 5-16 rivets and cut them to correct size.

Outer wing spar

Riveted the outer wing spar.

The other one is primed and left to dry overnight. Started with the aft spars. Deburred and bent the flange to correct angle.

Left outer spar updrilled

Updrilled the right outer spar

Rather straight forward, but I wish I had the Drill Doctor when I reached the steel. I hope I stacked them right though.

Stacking of outer spars

Finished with dimpling and priming the mating surfaces of the vertical tail. Can't rivet the skin before Lasse has been here. Started stacking up the main outer wing spars just to understand how it is going to be. I wonder if I got enough long clecos to do this. Also the main webs was very water stained, probably during transport or storage at Sonex (Indoor in Norway the humidity is way too low for any water staining). Water staining is the most common kind of crevice corrosion in aluminium. Water staining will make the aluminium even more corrosion resistance, but it also makes it harder to get coating to stick.

Ordered a bunch of CherryMax rivets for the ribs on the Horizontal tail, the spar and aft rivets will be solid. There really is a huge difference in diameter of the holes that are drilled with #30, deburred the "old way" and dimpled and the ones that are drilled with #31, deburred the correct way and dimpled with the "tuned" dimple dye. Dimpling is a much more straight forward process when using solid rivets.

Also ordered i Christmas gift from my wife, a Drill Doctor 500X from ACS Germany. It seems to me this 6061 T6 is much harder on the drill bits than 2024 T3. When I get this Drill Doctor I will always have super-sharp drill bits which is the most important thing regarding hole quality and to minimize burrs. The 500X will sharpen anything, high-speed steel, cobalt and TiN.

up-drilled the vertical tail

When the electricity came back after the hurricane Ivar had come and gone I updrilled the vertical tail using 31 drill bit (and 30 for the tip).

Vertical tail skin and tips

Pilot drilled the hinge and the rest of the skin and tip. The skin was still too tight around the tip, so I trimmed the skin a bit. Still it was too tight, so I had to trim the tip as well. This time I only trimmed it so a thin fibre glass was left. After I reinforced it on the inside with two layers of glass cloth and epoxy.