On monday 28th of May, we had a builder meeting in the workshop of Hugo. In the image left to right: me, Fred and Hugo.

Hugo is currently working on the fuel lines and fuel pump. Lot's of usefull info for later. As usual, a planned 3 hour meeting ended up late at night.

In the meanwhile, my replacement parts for the fuel tank baffle have arrived. As you may have read in the previous articles, I messed up the direction of the fuel tank sender plate on the rear tank baffle. (in other words, inverted the position of the fuel tank sender by drilling from the wrong side. Dummy ! I still can't believe I really did that).

Saturday 2nd June, I started installed a new reinforcement ring T407 and access plate T411 in the second bay of the fuel tank baffle. Van's gave green light to proceed this way and it is actually a good way to have access later on to the fuel senders in an easier way.

I  first made a drawing to have an idea of the size of the access plate and centered it using the middle drilled holes for the z-brackets as reference. Removed the old doubler plate and rivetted on a small aluminum plate over the hole.
I needed to do this because otherwise, the fly cutter would not have a place for grip to guide the cutting process.

Using the fly cutter, making the hole was a piece of cake. You can see the temporary rivetted guidance plate in the picture below.

Then aligned the reinforcement ring on the inside of the tank baffle for matchdrilling. Crock cleco's do a great job here.

All matchdrilled

Then dimled the tank baffle (mind the direction !)  and machine countersunk the reinforcement ring.You have to go quite deep on the reinforcement ring to make a nice mating of ring and baffle (without opening between the two). This is because the baffle is relativly thicker then regular skin.

Then using a lot of clamps, rivetted the nutplates on. The clamps make sure the baffle is pressed nicely agains the ring while rivetting. I also always put a crock cleco on the middle of the nutplate to press it against the ring.

Nice job done, the tanks are ready to be closed now !

 Further on, I deburred the edges of the main wing skins and finished to machine countersink the main spar of the left wing.