Another productive day

After some quick breakfast and socializing today, Dad and I headed over the the hangar to continue where we left off on Tuesday. How lucky are we to have two of the same days off this week? We had to take advantage, and we did!

Today was much nicer weather wise and was perfect for priming. On Tuesday we didn't have the best of experiences with the primer, but today was much different. We were able to get the gun set up properly and we also thinned out the primer quite a bit. Last time too much was being laid down, but fixed that problem. Having a fine touch and a not too anxious trigger finger makes for a much nicer result. Instead of it being blotchy, our end results were smooth and even. It took us a while to get all of the bare metal covered though, the metal is almost the exact same color as the primer in certain light, so we had to look at it at quite a few angles.

Once the parts had a nice coating on them, we let them bake in the warm Californian sun. After about an hour the parts were ready to be handled and we started clecoing the ribs to the main spar. After a few minutes it started to look like a wing! Well, at least the skeleton of one... After making sure all of the ribs were in the correct place we started looking up rivet call-outs and got to riveting! It seems like it's been forever since we've set some of our favorite fasteners. The manual calls for the manufactured head of the rivet to be on the rib flange side, causing less distortion once the rivet is set. Once we started riveting we noticed that the anodization began to spider-web around the rivets we had just set. We called up the Van's builder assist hotline and asked them about it; turned out this is perfectly normal. The anodizing is just an extremely brittle coating on the spar and there have been no problems caused by this phenomenon. We continued on and after about 40 minutes of riveting the ribs were all mated to the main spar! We didn't spend too much time admiring though, we still had the rear spar to do as well. There are less rivets on the rear spar, and there's quite a few you have to leave blank for future assemblies to be put on. Once the rear spar was fastened we decided to pick the whole thing up and slap her onto the jig! After all, that's what it's there for. We got our jack out and pumped up the middle of the wing assembly until it was level and looking good and decided we would leave it there for the night. Tomorrow, the right wing!