Ailerons

Finished the ailerons tonight! Well, except for prosealing and riveting the trailing edges, which I think we'll probably do as a batch job with the flaps and the R fuel tank. Oh yeah, the R fuel tank. Guess what I just discovered we did while I was standing here admiring our work on the tanks?

One of these things is not like the other one

While assembling the baffle for the R tank, I laid out all the attach zees in the correct order and orientation to start from the *outboard* side and not the *inboard* side. So the result? They are all backwards (the L tank pictured on the left above is correct). Grrrrrrr. That was an embarrassingly dumb mistake, and I get to take full credit for it. While we were originally putting these together, Sarah had relinquished her responsibility for the orientation of these parts because she didn't want to mess them up, and trusted in me to get it right. That will teach her...

I guess it's not the biggest deal in the world, things could be way worse. Looking through the forums I found more than one case of a builder doing the exact same thing. It's just going to be a time consuming, frustrating, and tedious ordeal to drill out all of the Zee rivets (12 solid rivets along the exterior flanges and 30 blind rivets for the interior), fish out all 30 of the blind rivet ends, regroup, and re-rivet them into place in the correct order. The hardest part is going to be to ensure we recover all 30 rivet ends. I think this is doable as long as we first wait for the proseal to cure, and take our time getting each piece to come out through the fuel fill opening.

Anyway, that was basically the only real excitement tonight, if you can call it that. Otherwise the ailerons are basically done, and we're ready to begin work on the flaps! We've got a number of plans, mostly related to flying over the next couple of days, so we may not get much more work in until the weekend. Oh yeah, and the fuselage kit should arrive at some point this week!