April 23rd, 2001
I've suffered my first mechanical setback of this project. My brand-spanking-new digital camera decided that it was no longer interested in writing anything to it's memory card. This is, you know, bad and stuff. So I call the manufacturer and they (of course) have this all figured out and decide to send me a new memory card for the thing. Well, I figure if I'm going to take this thing to Oshkosh I'm going to need WAAAAAY more the 4MB worth of picture taking power, so I went to the computer shop and picked up a new memory stick.
It didn't work. So, clearly, my camera is cashed after a mere 14 days of existance. Bottom line, no pictures. This is especially inconvenient since I'm supposed to photo document everything. I'll attempt to return this thing to the place I bought it tomorrow, but I'm sure I'll experience some resistance from them. One shall see.
Anyway, back to bid-ness. First thing to do is to deburr. I've drilled alot of holes this time around, so the deburring job was a lengthy one. While I was at that, I fired up the trusty compressor and got that all ready to go.
Next up was priming. My original plan was to prime only those parts that met with each other, leaving the "void spaces" clear of prime for weight savings. This was a great idea, but for this particular section, more of the sufaces meet then don't so I just ended up coating the whole darn thing. I'll get more stingy with the primer when I get to the fuse and wings, where there are larger void spots.
After about an hour of drying, I laid the skin back on the bottom of the stabilizer and began riveting from the rear spar towards then ends, then up the ribs and finally from the center of the front spar to the ends. I decided not to rivet the six holes forward of the front spar until I had the top of the skin secured, just in case those front rivets decide to try to alter the shape of the tip ribs.
Next up is to wrap the skin around to the top and begin drilling out the top of the skin.