1 hour
With the 4" inspection hole done, next I completed the pitot tube installation.
I carefully lined up the pitot tube mounting plate on the wing, making sure the tube would point straight forward. Then I drilled through the four holes in the plate and through the skin. Next I clecoed a nutplate on the outside of each hole. Using the nutplates as guides, I drilled each nutplate rivet hole with a #41 bit. Then I removed the nutplates, dimpled the mounting holes, and drilled each screw hole to 3/16" for clearance with the screws. Finally I clecoed the nutplates back on the inside of the skin and riveted with the 3/32" flush rivets.
When I first looked at these parts, I wasn't sure how I was going to dimple the holes for the 3/32" rivets. I have the Sonex simple dimple die, but that's for 1/8" rivets, and I didn't really want to buy a rivet squeezer just for this. I ended up finding a 3/32" dimple die on Aircraft Spruce that's just like the Sonex one only smaller. It was like $25 which is kind of silly for what it is, but that was still the cheapest solution I could find!
I assembled the pitot tube to its mounting plate and did a test fit on the wing. It looks pretty good, but I did find that the screws used to mount the pitot tube plate to the wing strip out really easily, even with a proper size screwdriver. I think I will replace these screws with hex or torx screws for the final installation later. For now I'll leave it off the wing so it doesn't get damaged.
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