DATE: 07/25/2024 – TIME: 3:30
Per yesterday’s entry I sent pictures of what I had done to the nose of VS-1006, 1013 and 1015 to find out if I had removed too much material as they were creating pressure on the VS-1001 skin. Here are the two pictures:
I received a quick response from Tom in Vans support and this was his reply:
The nose of those ribs are going along for the ride and the VS Stab skin is strong at the leading edge so you do not need to replace the ribs. You can tap the nose of the ribs to bend them in slightly, that should relieve any pressure points.
Thanks!
So that’s a great relief. As a consequence, and I have not done this yet, I am going to clean up the front edge of the rib noses to make sure there is no pressure on the skin. I also received a suggestion from Burt that I should make sure the flanges are properly flush against the skin before riveting as once they are riveted, particularly in the centre rib, it’s extremely difficult to fix.
Yesterday EJ and I spent most of our time making sure everything was properly aligned and then started final size drilling all the #40 VS-1001 related holes (apart from those marked for exclusion). It became apparent pretty quickly they everything seemed to be final size already except, perhaps for the holes on the rear spar and therefore through the par caps as I had not final sized drilled the caps yet.
Then we took the skin over to the DRDT2 C-frame dimpler and the dimpling went very quickly. We were able to dimple all the holes on the C-frame except for the 6 innermost nose holes, 4 of which I will do with my 3″ yoke squeezer and the middle ones (I think in VS-1013) I’ll do with the rivet puller dimpler.
I am posting all of the video taken on the day of the log entry. You can view and skip through as you see fit, or run it at 2* normal speed in full screen or as it appears.