I started the day by doing the final shrink on the entire wing. I did the bottom of the wing first, then flipped it and did the top. It shrunk up nice a tight.
Next, I needed to undo a mistake from yesterday. I got ahead of my self and put the leading edge finishing tapes on and forgot to pre-glue the area before hand. The tapes are a peel and stick affair, but to get them to stick down around the rivet heads, the addition of regular fabric glue is necessary. So, as a result the tapes weren't sticking around the rivet heads when I did my detail work leaving what looked like air pockets around the heads. Ugly. Once I realized my mistake, I quit for the evening. I had been working all day anyway and was tired.
This morning, I wasn't sure if I would be able to remove the tapes and decided to give the smallest tape a try. I used the heat gun and picked a corner up with my finger nail and slowly peeled it off. It left a little glue residue, but peeled off nicely. So, I went for it and peeled them all off to start over. After getting them all off, I used some Acetone to remove the glue residue. Back to square one, I glued the area around all the rivet heads and the seam that the finish tapes are meant to cover. I then cut new tapes and started applying them. Perfect.
Next up was to install the fabric rivets on all the ribs, about 42 per side.
Once those were installed I wiped them down and the 2 inch width around the ribs with Acetone. Then I applied glue down the rib edges using a one inch brush making sure the rivet heads had plenty of glue around them for the tapes. After the glue dried, it was time to cut the tapes and apply them. After the tapes were down I used the Toko iron set to 145C to go over the edges of all the tapes.
With the exception of a couple of finishing tapes to be put on the tail feathers, covering is finished on the plane. All that's left on the wings is to install sea plane grommets on the trailing edge to allow water to escape from the wing, and to install inspection covers on the bottom of each wing, about 20 per wing.
