With the leading edge wiring and plumbing done, it’s time to attach the leading edges to the spar. This is one of those “it’s going on for good” tasks so I spent a little time cleaning up the outboard spars – primer touchup, general dusting, etc – before nailing these things on permanently.

One of the minor headaches of attaching the leading edges is how to rivet their ribs to the spars. The plans call for solid AN470-4-x rivets, but access is limited for driving the rivets from behind the spar; even with a ground-down double-offset rivet set, there just isn’t much room to get on the rivet heads without scuffing or denting the spar or main ribs. And my arms aren’t skinny enough to work a bucking bar inside the leading egde. So I opted to use the blind rivets that Van’s says are an acceptable substitute. The only downside is that the limited space between main ribs and rib-to-spar rivets makes it difficult to get a blind rivet puller on the rivet stems.

But that was a problem I could solve. At Oshkosh this year I bought a very skinny blind rivet puller from Avery, it has one of the smallest heads I’ve ever seen on a rivet puller. Even so, I still had to grind down the head quite a bit to get it to fit. Here’s the final product; note that I covered the ground-down upper surface with tape to protect the ribs, and also to keep the guts of the puller in place since I had to remove basically all the enclosing metal at the top.

Blind rivet puller used on wings

After pulling all the rib-to-spar rivets, I squeezed the AN426 skin-to-spar rivets. No problems here, everything came out great! Here’s the obligatory hero picture.

Wing leading edges attached