December 25, 2006

These ribs are thick enough so I can pull the staples out by just pulling the nylon rope while holding the rib down. Some of the staples come fully out, but most of them just become one legged, easily pulled out. Next, I needed to trim the gussets to the rib. Before I had been gluing one side of gussets, trimming them, then gluing the other side, then trimming them. With these ribs, I'm gluing the gussets on both sides at the same time. The laminate trimmer bit can't follow the rib shape when there is a gusset in the way underneath. I utilized the new dremel for shaving down the underside gussets enough so that the trimmer bit could follow the rib, trimmed the top side, flipped it over and then trimmed the shaved side down to match the rib.

Here's the completed rib. This whole process was pretty basic with no big surprises. I should be able to move through the ribs with no problems.

I tried doing the flap rib for this station using the same punch holes through the blueprints method. It worked pretty well but I had trouble getting a nice smooth curve on the last trailing edge flap rib that has a slight concave shape. I may have to figure something else out to get that piece right.

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