Section 14 – Top Skin

Dad is in town and we’ve had a good couple of days working on the right wing. First we finished riveting the inboard top skin to the ribs and spar. The we dimpled the outboard top skin and riveted it as well. We estimate that we drove about 600 rivets over the past two days.
RV-14 Right Wing

Below you can see the J-Channel box stiffeners inserted in the ribs and riveted to the wing skin.
IMG 2557

Here is the outboard aileron bracket riveted to the outboard rib and aft spar.
IMG 2556

And here’s a time lapse video of our work today:

Section 14 – Top Skin

My friend Rick came over on Saturday and we got started riveting the inboard top skin on the right wing. We got 3 rows done.
RV-14 wing skin

After Rick left I finished with the wing root nutplates and clecoed the outboard skin to the wing for safe keeping. I think it will stay there until I get some more riveting help show up.

Section 14 – Preparing Top Skins

Today I got the 3/8 inch hole reamed in the aft spar thanks to the helping hand of Ashley. Then I got the aft spar riveted onto the ribs. I squeezed most of the rivets but the bottom row of rivets was tough to get to (without a longeron yoke…may need to invest) so I drove those with the gun. In the end, it would have been faster to drive all of them because I wouldn’t have had to mess with new squeezer settings for each different size of rivet. Maybe I’ll do that for the right wing. The third rivet from the top on each rib is left open for attachment of the aileron and flap gap faring.IMG 2287
After getting the spar on the ribs, I started on Section 14 by clecoing the wing walk doublers and the inboard top skin onto the wing. This is done so you can match drill the skins with the doublers and to use the skin to match drill the nutplate rivet attach holes into the rib spar.

IMG 2285

I also found where I made a small mistake. It instructs you to dimple all wing ribs LOWER FLANGE back in chapter 12. I dimpled lower and upper flanges. But now on page 14-02, it tells you not to dimple the upper flanges where the wing walk doublers cover the first 4 ribs. This is because the skins are to be machine countersunk in this area. I don’t think this is too big of a deal, I can undimple the few affected holes.