Lots of things happened in the last three days. Once the skeleton was done, I prepped the right HS skin, sanding out interior scratches, trimming off blue plastic, and smoothing edges. I started dimpling with the pneumatic squeezer, and then Ellen and I continued with the DRDT-2.

Ok, here’s a quick quiz…what step didn’t I list above? That’s right, I forgot to debur the right HS skin rivet holes until we were about halfway through dimpling. Before doing any more, I called Van’s to see how bad I screwed up. Well, I lucked out – because the cure was simply to sandpaper the male side of the dimples to remove burrs. After reading some newsgroup posts on this problem I considered the possibility of structural problems – cracks, etc. – from dimpling with burrs, but Van’s wasn’t concerned. That’s good enough for me…but this is one mistake I’ll work hard to avoid in the future.

…and I didn’t make the same mistake on the left skin. It’s finished and the HS is done until the Super Koropon primer arrives, which I hope will be in the next week. Can somebody explain to me why it takes PRC-DeSoto a month to ship one 2-gallon kit of epoxy primer?

DVD of the day – ‘The Great Waldo Pepper’. A great, yet underappreciated movie – and in my opinion, some of the best flying scenes ever filmed.