Rib prep is complete. You’ve seen pictures of fluted ribs before, so I’m not gonna waste my disk space and your bandwidth on one.

One thing to note here – the fluting process tends to bow the flanges back out a bit. Although the wooden flanging tool puts the flanges right at 90 degrees, I wound up bending the flanges a little past 90 with my hand seamer so that they popped back out to the right position. If I were building that flanging tool now, I’d modify it to put a little extra bend in the flanges to avoid all the extra manipulation with hand seamers.

Before the main ribs went on the wing, I drilled holes for electrical wiring conduit using one of the locations recommended by Van’s – in particular, a 3/4″ hole on the lower portion of the web between the first and second lightening holes.

If you choose to use this approach, beware that Van’s only depicts the hole locations on inboard ribs – the ones with “D” shaped lightening holes up front – and you’ll have to do a layout for the outboard ribs as well. Once I had a pilot hole laid out on all three types of “L” and “R” ribs it was easy to cleco one of those ribs to its opposite – an “L” rib to an “R”, and vice versa – using the tooling holes, and simply match-drill in preparation for opening the holes to 3/4″ with a Unibit. My conduit holes came out fine, and were lined up well enough to accommodate Van’s flexible corrugated tubing.