Stjohn's RV-7

3.5 hours
Last time, I was freaking out about edge clearance in a few places and also freaking out that drilling my inboard ribs out of sequence was going to totally hose me. Van’s tech support talked me down off the tower and explained that my hole in HS710 is close enough and if the ribs fit, they fit. So that greenlit the next move which resulted in this:

I managed to cleco the skins on, but the ship has drawn first blood. A subtle way of telling me to deburr edges before trying to finagle a fit in tight places. This was about an hour before the above pic, where I was trying to cleco the skin to HS708. So everything had to come apart, I rechecked all my edges and beat down the offending ones with the scotchbrite wheel. But after that little fracas, the skin went back on, and without too much scratching of the metal. You can see here that I’ve kept all the blue stuff on my skins while I’m learning how to keep from scratching it so much that I’ll actually have to paint the airplane. Speaking of which, is there a color called “TIE Fighter White?”
Here are a couple of shots of the ribs vs the edge of the skin. Not bad, but I got them a lot more lined up before I did any drilling.


And here’s the first noticeably airplane-looking thing I’ve done so far: