This past couple of weeks - we moved into a new house! Sasha starts work at a new team! Cher (our cat) returns to her rightful family home! Finally, some airplane parts are built :)

We actually decided to start priming the outside parts of our skins before we rivet them so that the primer is there under the rivet line. So, we finally busted out our special outside primer and primed the vertical stabilizer skin. Unfortunately, because the viscosity of the primer was a bit high for our gun, there was an unseemly splat:

We closed the elevator skin, with Peter’s friend Kane taking some very epic action shots of him and David (another friend :)).

To continue with the theme of Peter and Sasha’s incidents in the hangar, we managed to put one of the floating ribs under the skin backwards, so eventually ended up de-riveting the skin to flip it and get rid of the unsightly (and potentially dangerous, as it could lead to cracking) bump. Turns out that Rib 5 is asymmetric - not something Peter recognized at first glance :) So, installing it incorrectly results in a bump on one side and indent on the other.

Peter unrivetted this many rivets to flip the rib and fix the issue:

Finally, we assembled several more wing rib assemblies. We ran into an issue where some of the plates weren’t matching quite well with the rib holes and bushings, but this appears to be resolved thanks to some advice from the Sling Builders Facebook group.

How about you folks? Any issues with things not fitting quite right or installing backwards? Leave a comment below! Next week marks July 4th and roughly a ~year of building the Sling TSi for us :)

Cheers and happy building!