Dave's Sonex Builders Log

Completed drilling the corner relief holes. Next I cut out the corners of all of the ribs. The next step will be to trim the remaining four sides of all the main ribs.

Drilled a bunch more corner relief holes in the main ribs tonight. I only have 6 left to finish.

My hole flanging dies arrived today from Sonex. I tried flanging the lightening holes in the nose ribs. It seems to work okay but the ribs that started out flat are now slightly dished. I don’t know if this is okay or if I’m doing something wrong.

I started to drill the corner relief holes in the main rib blanks today. This is a very slow process, drilling four holes per blank.

This morning I completed the hammer forming of the nose ribs. I think I have one extra so I won’t need to rebuild one of my early attempts that did not turn out. I still need to flange the holes. I ordered the flanging tool last week from Sonex so hopefully it will arive next week sometime.

Two sessions of forming ribs today. I now have only 10 left to form.

40 minutes and 4 more nose ribs tonight. I’ve got it down to 10 minutes per rib. I guess that means a total of 260 minutes to form all 26. Only 4 hrs and 10 minutes.

More forming of nose ribs today. I managed to get four made in one hour. This is going to take a while but they are now turning out well.

I worked at hammer forming the nose ribs today. I had tried the previously without much success. Today I tried again. The first rib had very small flutes and the flange was not very straight. I tried using my fluting plyers to straighten the flange resulting in marks on the flange. I don’t know if they will do any harm but I’d prefer not to use this rib. I also tried a flanging tool made with bearings for the lightening hole and this resulted in a rib that was even more bananna shaped. This rib will be scrapped. My second attempt was better but I still ended up with marks on the flange. I don’t plan to use the fluting plyers on the flange again other than for fluting. Today I enlarged the reliefs on the forming blocks and tried again. I used a 1/2" socket extension to hammer the flutes and then the fluting plyers on the flutes to help straighten the rib. This seems to work and I ended up with two good rib. I will scrap the first two but I only have to make one new one as I made an extra anyway.

Today was spent cutting lightening holes in the nose ribs. The fly cutter worked well. The longest part of the job was clamping and unclamping the ribs. I could have used some of the spring type clamps but since I don’t have any, C-clamps had to do.