Wings 80 Total 543 Deburred the Fuel Tank Ribs

Took some pics of the curved nose portion of the wing leading edge ribs, and also managed to debur the fuel tank ribs. While doing the fuel tank ribs I found one that had a partially punched hole, but it did not go all the way through. I also noted that the curvature on most of the tank ribs is rather extreme. It is going to be interesting to see how well these ribs are able to straighten out. I will be working on that and final deburring of the nooks and crannys in each rib over the weekend, and hopefully I can start scuffing and cleaning them as well.

Here are the delicate cutouts on the nose of each of the of the ribs:

I still need to debur the edges of these small cutouts and some of small tooling holes in the rib webs before they will all be truly deburred. I will fit a small piece of aluminum oxide sand paper (Available at Napa stores that carry their painting supplies) in between each of the cutouts to smooth each of the edges. I find it interesting that when you compare Van's rib design to something like the Sonex, you see that the Sonex does not bother with the creation of the cutouts on the tip of each not rib. Part of the reason for this is that I think you have to actually form each of the ribs for the Sonex, so they don't have you create the support structure for the tip of their ribs, which remains open. So I like the idea of extra support at the tip of each rib, but wonder if it is necessary to suppor the wing structure.

The reason I am so interested in this is that when the time comes to fit these ribs inside the wing skins, my experience with the horizontal and vertical stabilizors tells me that if there will be any problems at all, it will be these cutout flanges on the nose that may get caught or hung up on the skin or a rivet hole or something. In the case of the fuel tank ribs, this might cause problems with the fuel tank sealant being able to properly seat between the parts for a good seal. So a smooth round surface that nicealy conforms to the shape of the skins is what is needed here.