Wings 41,Total 504 Edge deburring Trailing Edge parts

Several doublers and the edges of each trailing edge wing spar needed to be deburred. The doublers are all 1/8 inch thick aluminum that have been punch cut from larger sheets of alclad aluminum. Each of the separation points frm the cuts leaves a small sliver of metal that is raised above the rest of the edge of the part. These slivers are about 2 inches apart from each other, and are more concentrated around areas of complex curves on each part.

Here is the inboard doubler plate and support fork for one of the wings:

And this shot shows the span of both rear spars:

To remove the burs from the edges of the thicker doubler parts, I used a fine toothed flat file, a round rat tail file or rasp, some aluminum oxide 200 grit sand paper, and my trusty scotch brite wheel.

I used thre flat file to flatten each bur so that was flush with the rest of the edge, adn then polished the edges smooth with the scotch brite wheel. After a while, I started looking like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz.

It's a good thing that this stuff washes off fairly easily. Here are the two inboard forks. The last one of these that I had to work with was the one for the rear spar of the vertical stabilizer. The forks are a pain to debur because it is impossible to use the scotch brite or any of the smaller attachments to get to the inside edges of each fork. This requires sand paper and good old elbow grease. You can't only use a file on these edges because the file itself leaves stress risers in the form of the grooves from the teeth of the file itself, so sand paper (non-silicone) must be used for the edge smoothing around the forks.  The process actually went rather well nd did not take too much time.

I managed to get all the parts deburred except for the trailing edges. I will get those done tomorrow. It will be an interesting exercise to try to debur the long edges of each rear spar on the scoth brite wheel - may have to think through that one a bit to make sure I don't screw anything up.

While staging the rear spar parts, I came across a bag of parts that contains the aileron hinges that are ultimately riveted to the rear spar of each wing. It was kind of fun to just assemble these parts as a dry run for later. I have been curious abot the hinge assemblies for quite some time now, adn doing this allowed me to better visualize how things are put together on the wings.

Then I decided to take some pics of my two newst tools in the arsenal. My new cutting wheel and spray gun are shown. Priming all of the rear spar parts is just around the corner, so I will be putting the spray gun and my new 2-part epoxy primer to use shortly. There will be a ot more elbow grease involved to prep the surfaces for primer. Bigger and longer parts also mean more prep time required before priming.