C'est Finis. Thursday 4/18/24 and I am finally able to wrap up the 2024 CI. It was, in all actuality, a pretty straight forward condition inspection with no major findings or problems, but there always seemed to be something in the way of progress.
The last part, the wings, is also the easiest. There is relatively little to disassemble and little to have go wrong. There are three panels on the under side of each wing. I don't remove all of the panels every year as there isn't much to see under most of them, but I do remove them periodically just to take a look. This was the year to remove them all to get a good look and there is no sign of anything being off kilter.
The only one that really has anything going on under it is the outboard one. That is where the aileron bellcrank is and how one gets access to the rivets that hold on the inboard aileron attach bracket that is the subject of a Van's Service Bulletin, SB 16-03-28.
This is another one of those SBs where the repair action is pretty involved and the potential exists to make things worse in trying to make them better, so Van's recommends not performing the terminating action unless cracks are present. Fortunately, I have not been gifted with the present of cracks.
While it is nice not having cracks, this is not a repair I would want to have to do, something struck me this year that apparently hadn't registered before. On the left wing, the factory heads of the rivets are on the forward side (inside the wing) and on the left wing they are on the aft side of the spar (outside the wing). If you look closely at the top photo, the factory heads are a little disfigured.
I believe that what happened was that the left bracket was riveted on first and they noticed that is was difficult to get good results with the rivets in that orientation so on the other wing they flipped them around to make it easier to set those rivets. It looks like it worked.
Once everything was opened and I was sure there were no scary cracks, it was time to inspect the rest. That doesn't really take too long and I didn't find anything. After that I lubricated all of the moving parts and it was time to put everything back together.
The last thing I did was to replace and lubricate the O-rings in the gas caps and readjust them. It should have been done some time ago, but I didn't get to it, so I did it now.
Once all that was done I rolled it out and taxied it up to the gas pumps to top it off so that it would be ready to go fly tomorrow.
Glad to have that taken care of and ready to fly the wings off it the rest of the year.