Wings

Sarah had to work today and has some family plans later on, so I decided to continue with the leading edges myself, and then I think tomorrow we'll finally get around to continuing/finishing the top skins.

First, the brackets for the landing lights had to be fabricated. An annoying thing about the Duckworks kit that I discovered was that because I got the lampless kit, I didn't get any instructions other than the two templates (skin and rib) and a very rough sketch that shows how it's all supposed to go together. No big deal, but it required figuring out which rivets were for what, and where the nutplates go, etc etc. Also, the baggie that they sent containing all the rivets and fasteners also had a small roll of double-sided tape in it, which stuck to all of the parts inside, resulting in a sticky, goopy ball of rivets and nutplates that was very difficult to separate and clean off.

In order to figure out how to proceed with fabricating the bracket, I relied heavily on Tim Olson's writeup on his site (link here) which helped a ton... thanks Tim! Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the fabrication process, but I ended up with a very similar-looking piece to what can be found on his site with the same overall length of 15-1/2" (the distance between the two outboard-most ribs). The only difference is that my cutout in the bracket for the landing light will fit my 40W LED  spotlight instead of Tim's HID setup. I'll take some pics and post them once it's assembled again. It did come out pretty nicely, and I'm excited to see it all installed and working!

Once the bracket was made for the L side, I duplicated the fabrication process to make a mirror image bracket for the R side. Then, I started the prep work on the R leading edge by assembling the ribs, splice strip and J-channel into the skin. Final-drilled all the holes, and cut out the hole in the leading edge for the landing light. Of course, this side does not have a stall warning system, but I am electing to install an access hatch on this side too, just in case we ever need to get in there for some reason.

Unbelievably, there are zero pictures from anything at all today! Sorry about that, it was a lot of heads-down work on the landing lights and then more of the same kind of stuff  that had already been documented for the L wing, replicated on the R side.