Front Pulley Bracket
Craig came back over today and we started by drilling out the rivet that failed to pull on the front pulley bracket. We cut a slot in the stem using the same jig we used for this problem in the left wing. We then tried to drive out the stem using a thin piece of aluminum as a shield between the stem and the spar bulb. We got the stem to just touch the aluminum shield but were worried that the shield wouldn’t hold up so we tried drilling the stem from above using a #45 bit. This worked really well and let us drill out almost the entire stem. When there was just a tiny bit of the stem remaining we were able to rotate it so that the cut out part was above the bulb and then lightly tap it out. Finally, we drilled the head off the rivet and knocked the tail of the rivet out with the shield in place. While this worked well a thin piece of steel (22 GA or so) would make a better shield than the sheet aluminum and allow us to knock the rivet pieces out with more confidence.
Once the rivet was removed, we briefly ran a #30 bit in the hole again so that it wasn’t as tight and tried pulling the rivet again. We also made sure to hand pull the rivet until the head was all the way down against the bracket and the tail (back of the stem) was no longer in contact with the spar bulb. At this point we pulled it with the pneumatic puller and it pulled correctly. This finished section 251 of the right wing build.
Rear Spar Reinforcement
After the front pulley bracket was taken care of, we started working on installing the rear spar reinforcement. This went smoothly and was done per section 262 of the manual and in the same way it was done on the left wing. The key here is to position the reinforcement correctly and use a lot (8+) clamps to hold it in place before starting to drill any of the holes. This helps ensure that any adjustments you have to make as you drill are extremely minor. We got all of the holes drilled before calling it a day.