It has been a while..... HS skins dimpled - a few dings also fixed

Wow. No posts since Thanksgiving. Can that be right? I think that was the time that Denver went into a deep freeze (again), and I crawled inside and waited for it to warm up again. Even the little heater I bought for the garage can't compete with -9 degrees. Well, I am happy to say that the project is still alive, and I have been back at it again, dimpling the skins on my new C frame table.

In fact, I already made two boo boos and had to correct both of them. I learned that moving large sheets of aluminum in a confined space and trying to keep the hole inserted over the male dimple die in the C frame can sometimes be a difficult thing to do by yourself. The end result was the creation of or attempted creation of a dimple where there was no hole, because the skin slipped out right as I was about to smack the ram with the hammer. An extra set of hands is very helpful during this dimpling process.

A back rivet set and metal back plate worked really well, and I was able to smash the unwanted protrusion back into place. A bit of smoothing with scotch brite pad or some sand paper and all is well. Then I had to apply the same fix to a small crease that appeared after the mallet missed the ram and landed on its edge and caused a small crease in the skin. The same fix pounded the crease right out, and now you can hardly tell it was there.

These ocassional mess-ups are all part of the learning process, and they happen to just about everyone involved in building an airplane. You just have to keep moving forward and be prepared to resolve the problems along the way.

So the quick status is that the left HS skin is almost completely dimpled, and this weekend I hope to have the right side skin dimpled, and all edges smoothed and deburred, and the parts cleaned with acetone, so that I can prime them (when the weather gets warm enough), and finally start driving rivets to create the horizontal stabilizer. I find myself dreaming about Oshkosh 2010 during all this cold weather. Still have lots of great memories of my first experience there last year. More pics will follow.