Well I've been out of town for the past few days. Kerin and I drove over to Blacksburg, VA to visit her sister on the long weekend. Kind of a bummer that I had a 5 day weekend and didn't get to work on the plane except today.
Anyway, it struck me about 2:00am last night that when I dimpled the left tank skin that I inadvertently dimpled the two rows of holes for attaching the skin to the baffle. These are supposed to be countersunk instead. Well damn! I got to worry about that for the six hour ride home.
I had actually considered intentionally dimpling these holes anyway except for the few at the very inboard end of the tank. See, I believe the reason they have you countersink these is because there is very little clearance with the spar cap bars for the shop heads of the rivets. However, once you get past the inboard eight holes or so, the spar cap bars are machined down (thinner), so this isn't a problem. What I was thinking of doing is dimpling all but the inboardmost eight holes. Unfortunately when I was dimpling, I forgot all about this and just dimpled the entire rows (both top and bottom).
The next morning I went down to scope out the situation:
Well after all that I was feeling pretty good...thinking this is gonna work out just fine...until I looked at dimpling the baffle. See, the baffle flange holes are so close to the bend radius that there's no room to get the dimple dies lined up with the holes. I went out to the Cleaveland Aircraft Tool site and found a small diameter female dimple die that looked like it would do the job. But wait...I dimpled the skin with the tank dies, so that means I need to dimple the baffle with tank dies also. But Cleaveland doesn't make a small diameter dimple die with the tank sized recess. So I sent an e-mail to Mike at Cleaveland asking him if he would make me a small diameter dimple die with the tank die sized recess instead of the regular 3/32 inch recess.
Mike remembered me from the time I worked with him on the modifications I made to The Main Squeeze squeezer. See Tue Apr 5 2005. He was thankful for that help and offered to make me one and send it to me at no charge! How's that for service?!!! Thanks, Mike.
Hopefully I'll get that die soon so I can try dimpling the baffle.