Almost done with the Flettners

I had a long-ish day at work today and by the time I fought my way across town through rush hour traffic, relaxed for a half hour while the Co-owner prepared dinner, and wolfed down my share (and a little more) of same, there wasn't much time or energy left for a long session on the Schmetterling production floor.

Perhaps my mental fatigue had carried over from work. How bad was it at work? Well, I commented a piece of programming code thusly:

// I'd be disappointed and more than a little perplexed if this ever happened

Someday my replacement will look at that with the same level of confusion and WhatDaHellism that I looked at this tonight:



Follow me as I try to do the math:

"Remove the hinge pin from one AN257-P3X6'"

Ok, after having done so I have two pieces of AN257-P3X6', right?

Then there's some blah blah blah, followed by an all-caps (that must means it's important!) "MAKE FOUR HINGE HALVES"

Huh? Out of what, exactly? The two pieces I have now?? Am I supposed to cut them each in half? Well, no. I'm supposed to trim them to 32 1/2 inches. I gave up and figured I'd worry about the other two hinge halves later. I won't need them until section 11. In the meantime, the tin snips cut the two halves off at the 32 1/2 inch mark quite easily:



The second half of the page provided detailed instructions and drawings regarding the use of the HS-1223 drill guide. What it didn't provide was any hint at all regrading where to find the HS-1223 drill guide. After a prolonged search, I found it in one of the little bags. That was after finally resorting to pulling out the inventory sheets and looking at them a half dozen times before finding the location of the HS-1223 drill guide at the very bottom of the last page.

The HS-1223 drill guide is supposed to fit between the hoops of the hinge and get clamped into place. Unfortunately, it's a very tight fit. So tight, in fact, that trying to push it into place bent of the hoops on the hinge, a sin that I will pay dearly for in section 11. I finally threw caution to the wind and filed off a nanometer of one of the edges of the HS-1223 drill guide. Things went swimmingly after that:





The HS-1223 dill guide had to be unclamped and moved to the next area of the tab for drilling. It took awhile. The second tab went much faster and easier, primarily because I knew exactly where the HS-1223 drill guide was.

Both parts are clecoed up and ready for transport up to the hangar for riveting, a job that I have (wisely, in my opinion) decided to defer until tomorrow night.