Right leading edge skin damage

It was dreadful when it happened. I spent full day today to calmed down enough to document what happened with the right leading edge top skin.

Damage

I previously moved the right wing to the floor to make space for the left wing. And I was at a point where I needed to stand the left main spar to the jig.

For some reason there was a hammer on the table next to the left wing jig. When I was pushing the table around and tweaking the wing jig, I must have pushed the hammer. It fell straight onto the right wing on the ground.

Inspection

With lots of curse and kicking myself in the butt, I immediately started damage control. I took a look around all skin, and the only damage appears to be in the leading edge area. It created a ding about 0.5 inch.

Ding ding ding

Next step action

I flipped through AC43-13, and I think technical it’s possible to build a doubler to cover this area.

I have not made custom doublers before. And I do not want the wing leading edge to be the first one to get a surgery like this. Besides, I am pretty early in the build progress. If I patch this over, I will probaly think about it for the entire build process.

So I decided to order a new part and move on.

I put in the replacement oroder, and started to drill out the rivets. It’s definitely a painful process. Oh well, lesson learned!

You can see some rivets removed from the leading edge. That’s about 1 hour’s work. I will need at least another 2-3 hours to fullly drill out the rest of the rivets