26 March 05 - More Wing/Wing Skin Prep

We're still working towards getting the right wing skin on, but there are quite a few things that have to happen before we actually get this on - everything needs to be deburred and dimpled, we need to figure out how we're going to get the autopilot servo in, and we need to figure out what we're doing with wiring runs. We may not get through all of that today (in fact, I know we won't, but that's only because I'm typing this the following day) but we'll give it a shot and see how far we get.

Let's start with the obvious stuff - these have all been countersunk . . .	. . . and the skin has all been dimpled.
Nutplates for the access panel are on. Also, the skin has been primed, for whatever that's worth.	Lots of head-scratching resulted in a trip to Home Depot to pick up this big honker of a drill bit. Some of the interior ribs are difficult to get to with the unibit, and hopefull we'll be able to use this to get to those.
There are now two places to run wires where previously there was only one. Most of these holes were drilled out to 7/16" with the unibit and not with the big honkin' drill bit - the holes seem to be cleaner with the unibit.

Lessons learned - the unibit is a much better tool for enlarging the tooling holes in the wings than anything else. About the only thing that it can't reach (before the last skin is on) is the ribs that form the extra-strong wing-walk area. Those take a bit of patience.

Also, although it didn't make it onto the site, there was a large amount of head-scratching that went on about the installation of the autopilot servo. Trutrak doesn't include all of the mounting hardware that you need (there are a few bolts that are missing). According to Scott Will, who just did this a few months ago, I need to order some NAS1801-3-20 bolts from Aircraft Spruce - they're 1.25" long, fully threaded, and allow the use of locknuts. You probably wanna go ahead and order those if you're planning on mounting one of these servos.

In any case, it's nice to have that information and we'll keep working on this tomorrow. The original goal was to get the wing closed up this weekend, but we may not hit that goal. We'll see.

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