Well I almost completed the rib prep today. There are 48 skin attach holes, 7 main spar attach holes, and 4 rear spar attach holes on each rib. Each hole has to be final drilled, and deburred, with nearly all the skin attach holes also being dimpled. And there are 14 ribs in each wing. That's a lot of holes, it was a big job so say the least. And I forgot drilling and enlarging the wiring holes for snap bushings. I'll be doing that tomorrow, along with priming each rib.
The flap hinge brackets and the aileron torque tube support are all primed and ready to install on their respective ribs.
In order to drill the top and bottom bolt attachment holes and final drill the main spar attach rivet holes I had to cleco all the ribs in place on the spar. It was nice to be able to see the structure coming together.
I realized a mistake I made in dimpling the ribs during the prep stage. The plans have you only dimple the bottom flange of each rib at this point, dimpling the top flanges just before placing top skins. The reason for this is that the ribs at the wing walk do not get dimpled on the top flange, but skins get countersunk. Following the plans method would require dimpling 220 holes with the squeezer, while the structure is riveted together. I decided that I wanted to use the DRDT-2 to form all the dimples, easier and quicker. I carefully noted which ribs were in the wing walk area and set them aside to not get dimples in the top flange. Somehow though I ended up dimpling the W-1010R top flange. An online search showed that I was not the first to make this mistake, and the others were told by Vans to just press out the offending dimples, so that's what I did. I'm going to make triple sure on the right wing that I don't dimple the tops in the wing walk area, in fact I probably won't dimple any of the top flanges until I've clecoed the ribs on the spar.
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