I’m a first time poster but long time reader of the Forum.
I have several questions about 2-2-v-i whose answers may be obvious to others, but in spite of my best efforts to be well versed in this subject, I am still in the dark. Sorry if the answers to these questions are obvious to others, but I did make an effort to find the answers before posting.
About the line of 5/32 inch rivet holes — line 5 at the bottom of the picture that Ric posted up thread at reply #369:
-This is said to be line of doubled rivet holes, but all that is seen on 2-2-v-1 itself is a single line of rivet holes, so how do we know that there was a second line of rivet holes?
-There is a ‘tab’ of sorts below the three complete rivet holes we see along this line of 5/32 holes, and here we don’t see double rivet holes. I recall that the explanation is that there was an underlying structural element at this location whose presence caused these rivets to be skipped; if that is correct, then what was that structural element underneath the skin below the tab? This seems an important point, because showing how the tab correlates with the underlying structure would help build the case that 2-2-v-1 matches the known underlying structure of AE’s Electra.
-The spacing between the 5/32 rivet holes is irregular (the partial holes as well as the full holes), while the spacing between holes for the other 4 lines of rivet holes is uniform. What is the reason for the irregular spacing of the 5/32 inch rivet holes?
Also:
I know nothing about airplane construction except from looking at various airplane rivet patterns as the discussion of 2-2-v-1 unfolded. My understanding from this very limited perspective is that airplane skins are typically riveted to the underlying airplane structure within perhaps a half inch of their edges. But I see perhaps 3/4 of an inch, maybe more, of aluminum skin beyond the line of row 1 rivets in Ric’s picture; also, what I referred to as the ‘tab’ below row 5 was presumably riveted somewhere below the red line in Ric’s picture, or else it would not be properly fastened to the plane, so it seems that 2-2-v-1- extended some distance beyond the edge of the tab.
So, my question comes down to this: at a minimum, how far above row 1, and how far below the tab, did 2-2-v-1 extend before it was torn away from the structure it was attached to? How and where were the upper and lower edges of 2-2-v-1 attached to the underlying structure of the Electra?