Aft Fuselage #8 (Aluminum material recall/repair)

Repair work: 20 hours.

The front and aft fuselages are joined on 4 corners at the longerons by splice plates… 3 of these 4 pairs splice plates were included in the material recall and had to be replaced.  1 pair in particular, the upper horizontal splice plates, would require a LOT of work to be undone in order to access and replace them.

In the following picture, you can just see the splice plates sticking out of the 4 front corners of the fuselage box.

Dissassembly begins from the top down… the large turtledeck former #1 has to be completely removed to access the bolts on the upper horizontal splice plate.

Next, the bottom of the cross tie box has to be opened back up… this had a LOT of rivets in it that needed drilling out. I used a drill stop to help with the process, and here you can see the drilled out rivet heads piling up on the drill. I shucked them off with the drill stop. A total of 126 rivets were drilled out during this process. These are stainless steel rivets, I went through 3 drill bits. As soon as a drill bit started to dull, the rivets would have a tendency to spin rather than drill out (potentially ruining the hole for a new rivet), so I kept using my newest and sharpest drill bits.

Dead and dying rivets.

Here’s one of the new splice plates next to the old one.

A few more rivets and I was able to remove the entire cross tie box and Z channels for unrestricted access to the longerons and splice plates. I’m probably the only Waiex builder who ever saw their plane gutted out like this…

Finally, I was able to remove and match-drill the new splice plates to the old ones.

New splice plates in position.

Then comes reassembly of all the parts I had to remove for this repair.

Repairs complete! Here are some shots of the old, defective parts.