Wings 67.5, Total 530.5 - Deburring the Wing Ribs

Had to take care of home repair projects over the weekend, so I was not able to get back to the build until now. The lawn mower and the dryer both decided to bite the dust at about the same time. Spent all day Saturday on the lawn mower, and the dryer is still pending... And so it goes.....

Tonight I managed to start the rib deburring process. First step was to debur the inside edges of all the lightening holes. My tool kit from Cleaveland tools included two different miniature Scotch Brite wheels mounted on a standard 1/4 inch drill shank. The plans mention that putting one of these in a drill will make the job quick and easy. My experience, however, is that the hand drills just don't turn the wheel fast enough for them to be totally effective. SO I mounted mine on my drill press as shown below:

Whne I started this process, the scotch brite wheel did not have any of the grooves in it. Next pic shows why the grooves appeared:

THis method worked out very well. Just run the edges around the turning scotch brite wheel. I did the major holes in the main ribs as well as all the tank and nose ribs. Only took about a half hour to do them all. I ran each edge around the wheel twice on one side of the rib, and that seemed to do a pretty good job deburring all the rough edges.

Here are the tank ribs with two smaller holes that also need to be deburred:

So am I done deburring ribs? Not by a long shot. Next comes all of the flange edges. The nose ribs will also require some hand deburring to get between all of the small separations around the curvature of the nose. This will probably take me several days to finish up all the edges, and then I will need to straighten and flute the flanges. This part has to be done extremely well to ensure that all of the holes in each rib will line up perfectly with the predrilled holes on the wing skins. The broken dryer actually makes a pretty good work shelf. Oh well, at least I got started tonight....