Main Spar Prep #10: Tie-Down Assembly continued

Although there have been a few imperfections I could have done better in previous steps, this morning, for the first time, I made a mistake big enough that I’m going to redo it. It has to do with the tie-down spacers AND the tiedown bar itself.

The left issue is pretty obvious. I thought I centered the spacer on the back of the tie-down bar, but it either slipped during drilling, or it wasn’t the right position, as the holes ended up being unacceptably close to the edges. You can see in the right picture, I fixed that with the second set of spacers. 


On the right side picture, the issue is a little less obvious. When I clamped down the tie-down bar for drilling the lower holes, I must have misaligned the bar. If you look closely, the bar is not parallel to the spar top. It’s probably not a big deal, but since I’ll need to buy some new aluminum bar to redo the spacers, I’m going to go ahead and get a new tie-down bar as well. Not ideal, but I’d rather get this one right.

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