Wings

Before moving on to the ailerons, I wanted to attempt to fix a problem with my scotchbrite wheel.

I regret that I abused this tool to some extent when I was working on my empennage. I didn't know any better. When deburring the edges of some of the skins, I ended up cutting a couple of deep grooves in this wheel. I have since been able to work the one in the middle out to some extent, widening it. But the one on the left is still bad. It grabs the piece you're working on and almost yanks it out of your hand. It's deeper than it looks in the photo above. Plus, as you can see, the wheel has developed a slope to it.

Before starting on the ailerons, I wanted to see if I could dress this wheel, flattening it out and doing something about the grove on the left. Several days ago, I put a request out on RivetBangers.com to see if anyone had any ideas on how to fix this wheel. You can read the whole thread here. I hate to spend the money and buy a new one if there's a way to dress this one up and fix it. I got a lot of replies, but nothing that I found worked real well. I tried several things before settling on this:

I finally tried a round cylindrical grinding stone in my die grinder. This works great! The two surfaces are spinning in opposite directions to each other, and it really works. Go slow and press hard. Let the stone cool once in a while. Below is the improvement after I worked on it. I could have gone farther, but I left a couple of grooves in the wheel. The bad one on the left was opened up a bit. I think this will work out just fine. There's still a lot of life in this wheel. Hopefully, enough to finish this airplane.

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