Did I mess up my aileron leading edge?
 

Welp, I made a mistake drilling the counterbalance pipe on my left aileron tonight. I go into a bit more detail on my blog: http://theskunkwerx.com/rv7/assembli...-left-aileron/

Essentially, I did not have my drill at a good angle when I tried to match drill into the A-409 counterbalance pipe using the aileron leading edge skin as a guide. When I started drilling, I did not notice the bit "walking" on top of the pipe and it chewed up my the hole of my leading edge skin, elongating it. See these photos:

Here's the "results" of my bad drilling, with a ruler to show sizes.


And here is what it looks like with a cleco in the hole:


Its the second hole from the end, as you can see here:


Is this something I can fix, maybe with a larger rivet? I checked the actual pipe, and the drill only got a few thousands of the surface, just a barely scratching the surface of the pipe, so I am pretty confident the pipe is OK to reuse / fix. BUT, I am really concerned about that leading edge. I went ahead and countersunk the pipe and dimpled the skin to see what the blind rivet would look like in the hole, and it had some meat that it grabbed, but I wanted to run this by the brain trust here on the forums.

Is this fixable? Did I just ruin this nice leading edge? Can I just drill the hole larger and use a bigger blind rivet? If so, any size suggestions?

Here is a link to a really high resolution, large photo of the hole in the skin, dimpled, with a ruler next to it, in 1/32" markings to get an idea of how elongated the hole is. I'll just direct link to the image, so it doesn't cause this post to be huge: http://theskunkwerx.com/wp-content/u...316_203907.jpg

Thanks!

Clean up the elongated hole, and drill two more holes, both sides of the bad hole aprox 1/2 inch from the bad hole, and put two more rivets in.

Did the same thing as you and Vans recommended the above fix. Build on!

Drill bushing
 

Buy a piece of brass tubing. Cut a piece about 1/2 the length of a #41 bit. Use it as a drill bushing.

Some things are just not right to do
 

Some things are just not right to do. One of these is to never look at the aileron rivets of a friend's RV. Never do this... it is just not right.

Can we apply this rule to "all" rivets and other evidence of less-than-perfect workmanship?

Thanks for all the replies and advice! I'll drill two more holes (hopefully much much better this time!) on either side of this janky hole and then consider this a "custom" piece of work :-)

And yes... I agree....Never look at your buddies rivets. Rivet envy is never good .... :o

Rivet shaming is even worse!!

I concur Lynn, them rivets are just there to hold the counterbalance pipe in place.