I finished deburring the ribs tonight and then drilled holes for the wing conduit. I made a simple paper template with marks to align with a couple of the bends and the flange of the rib and then center punched the spot.
I then drilled these out to #12.
And finally to 3/4″. A number of builders drill the intermediate holes to 13/16″, but the conduit can be worked through 3/4″ with a little persistence. As you can see from this wider shot, I’m putting the conduit where Van’s recommends (in the lower 1/3″ of the rib between the lightening hole and the reinforcement.
I finally clecoed the left wing together. As other builders have said, it feels so good to finally see some structure go together after many many hours of fluting and deburring the wing ribs.
The obligatory shot through the lightening holes for posterity.
I also took a shot through the conduit holes so you can see how well these align even with just a simple paper template for positioning. I’ve seen a number of builders spend a great deal of time building a template that aligns with the tooling holes in the ribs to ensure precise placement of the conduit holes, but this is rather pointless as the conduit is very flexible and even a simple method like this basically produces nearly perfectly aligned holes.
