Only put in about an hour today, but it felt like 12. I had to fight with crappy tools, which, again if you’ve read anything I’ve written you know how I feel about that. Drill bits, no matter how nice, on a long enough timeline are disposable. Treat them as such and you *may* come out of this with your sanity. As it stands, I mixed up a couple of my bits and had to fight with them to find out which ones would work and which ones wouldn’t as I made my way down the longerons, match drilling as I went. In the end, I ended up disposing of two bits after the process. I’m sure one was pretty worn to start, but another took a heavy toll with all of that drilling.
Really terrible, fuzzy picture, but if you squint you can… no you can’t. You can’t see what I’m talking about but it should be a row of nicely drilled holes through the longerons perfectly placed at the top edge of the tailcone skin. I’m pretty pleased with the work, and not bad for fighting with tools and getting all of those holes drilled real quick one afternoon between running my kids to various practices.
Total time today = 1 hours
Total time empennage = 147 hours
Total time aircraft = 147 hours