Well life and work got in the way again and here we are two months later having made zero progress. It's frustrating for sure. I have a dry erase board on my garage wall that I always record my last day of progress. Some times those numbers discourage me but I realize it's all part of the process. It's now after Thanksgiving and it's snowing outside. The warm days are behind us for now and maybe that's not a bad thing as the dark and cold tends to drive us all inside anyhow. With a couple of space heaters I can get the garage up to about 20 degrees warmer than ambient outside within a reasonable amount of time. So for now with temps in the lower 30's it's quite comfortable after about 20 minutes of letting the heat run. Come January, there are stretches that it is not practical to work out there. There is some good news, I did manage during this break to complete my tailwheel endorsement in the Citabria pictured below. I had a lot of fun doing that after I got used to the airplane and learned a ton in the process even after nearly 30 years and 11,000 hours of flying. We are so spoiled flying modern tricycle gear airplanes that pretty much go where we tell them to go. About an 80 minute drive from my house is a small operation that does tailwheel training, spin training, upset recovery training and aerobatics training using either this Citabria or a Super Decathalon. I wish it was closer but it's the best training around for tailwheel aircraft so I'm happy to have them somewhat close by. BTW I tried to buy this Citabria in 2019 for our flying club and this operation bought it out from under us. I'm glad it went to a good home that has used it well and it's sorta ironic to get my endorsement in this exact airplane! Sometimes after a lengthy break such as this it can be difficult getting going again. No matter where you left off or how many notes you write it just doesn't feel comfortable jumping right back into it without having to relearn where you were at, what you were thinking at the time and what you needed to do. So despite having nearly three weeks off of work it took me until that third week to get back to it. Just one excuse after another but at least I made a little progress on this night. I mentioned in my last post about forgetting a step in the assembly that I should have done BEFORE riveting the spar halves together, it was now time to get that done with some delicate surgery. Knowing from previous experience how easy this is to dork up, I took my time, taped everything off that I could and very delicately and slowly trimmed off the notches in the lower portion of the rear spar being careful not to make contact with the doubler. After drawing some reference lines which I based on the construction drawings, I used a pair of snips to make initial cuts. From there I used a Dremel with a cutting head on a low speed to slowly start taking material away. For the lateral cut, the one that would be closest to contacting the spar doubler, I didn't cut through the aluminum all at once instead just sort of chipping away at it a little bit at a time again being careful not to touch any other parts of the spar or doublers. This paid off and eventually with a lot of patience I had removed what I needed to and cleaned the rest up with my small deburring head attached to the Dremel. Again having the little diamond shaped deburring head to be able to attach to the Dremel made this fairly easy work to clean up all of the rough edges. I also used a scrap piece of aluminum to protect the other parts of the spar and doublers and this also was a huge help. After some careful cleanup and rounding of the corners, I'm happy with the results and finished by touching up the edges with some primer sprayed into an empty plastic yogurt cup using a q-tip a brush. Works great. After allowing that to dry I test fit the bolts that hold the 411PP bracket in place only to discover that they only would insert up to the threads and then they were too big for the #12 drilled holes. Hmmm.... Off to the internet to get some advice. Didn't take long in perusing the VAF site to realize that drilled holes are (on a microscopic level) very rough and not even round. The answer lies with using a proper reamer bit to make the final hole size to fit the bolts for a nice tight tolerance. Fortunately I happen to have a #12 reamer and just a few quick passes with that in each hole smoothed them out enough to allow the bolts to fit nicely in place. Lesson learned, drill and then ream if the hole size tolerance is minimal as it should be for a bolt. Not as critical with rivets as the rivets fill the void inside the hole.