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I worked a bit on one of the side skins. I fixed the bend near the corner rib. I didn’t make the bend quite tight enough at the forward end. I think it’s good enough now. I did a final pass on deburring the edges and tried to debur all of the holes.
The stupid Ni-Cad batteries in the cordless screwdriver seem to be developing a memory as they are running shorter and shorter over time. The screwdriver came with a flashlight, which I rarely use. The batteries are the same between them, so I tried swapping batteries. That didn’t help much. Maybe I’m just getting more tolerant of deburring and am able to do longer sessions at a time. I never used to run the battery down. Either way I’m going to have to buy another one.
Since I couldn’t do any more deburring, I switched to something else. I remember reading a suggestion by someone to reinforce the arm rests. Jack Lockamy reminded me of this tip this week. Apparently, it’s very tempting to put all of ones weight on the arm rests when hefting ones self in and out of the cockpit. That could make the arm rest buckle. I’m sure I could train myself not to do that, but guests could be unpredictable. It may not ever be a problem, but it’s easy to add some 3/4″ angle under the arm rests at this point to completely rule out the problem. I cut back one leg of the angle 1/8″ so it’s completely hidden under the arm rest. I thought about trying to round the corner of the angle so it would nest nicely inside the bend of the arm rest, but it would be too much work to do that for really no structural or aesthetic gain. I used the rivet fan to evenly space out 10 rivets along the angle. They ended up being a few inches apart. I drilled out the angle, then backdrilled one angle to the other and then backdrilled each angle to its respective arm rest. After some deburring, countersinking, and dimpling, they were done. It ended up being a couple hour diversion that was pretty fun.
The cordless screwdriver recharged enough to debur the rest of the right side skin. I followed that up with dimpling around all of the edges. I had to carefully study the plans and mark on the skin which holes don’t get dimpled. It’s basically the holes for the seat rib, around the wing spar, and the gear weldment. That side skin just needs some dimpling on the C-frame.