Compressed air drilling?

In the immortal words of Mick Jagger, "it's a gas gas gas!"

Having had my fill of drilling holes through the quarter inch thick aluminum side of the center section with a relatively slow turning battery-operated drill after just five painfully slow holes, I thought it might be worth the effort to un-cleco the assembly and haul it up to the hangar where I could use an air drill.

I was right.

It's not much of a drill - it was a $38 special at Harbor Freight - but it gets the job done far more rapidly than the battery drill. I knocked out an additional thirteen holes in the half hour that I had available before leaving for Easter dinner.

With eighteen of the holes done, I'm 25% through this job. Another couple of hours of drilling should do it.

I'll be glad when it's done, figuring (possibly naively) that this is my best chance to ruin the it-has-to-be-expensive-just-by-looking-at-it center section.