Thursday, March 5, 2015

Wings

The deburring, scuffing, and priming continues. While working on the 30 wing ribs, we started assembling the the W-1029 and W-1013 brackets for the aileron torque tube and aileron hinge, respectively. It's coming together!

I also learned an important lesson tonight... especially for these little multi-part brackets that you can cleco together in less than a minute and start banging away on the rivets, DOUBLE-CHECK THE PLANS AND YOUR ASSEMBLY BEFORE RIVETING. It's really easy to use the wrong rivet or orient a part wrong. Especially when the L and R wing assemblies are mirror images of each other, and the plans only depict the L side. If you don't realize this until you've started riveting, guess what, you have to drill it all out and start over. Happened to us on two of the six brackets we put together tonight-- both my fault. Things like this happen from time to time, for sure, but it's just frustrating to make dumb mistakes like that. Oh well, important thing is we caught our mistakes and everything came out just fine in the end-- just took more time and anguish than it should have.

Lastly, I finally came to a conclusion on how I want to run my wires and pitot/AOA tubing for the wings (for now, at least). I went through more mental gymnastics on this than I think I was prepared for, and sketched this up in a number of ways before drilling anything. Against what many have done, I'm not going to use conduit in the wings, but instead just use the grommets that Van's recommends, with a high-quality wire sleeve. I drilled 5/8" through all ribs in the pre-punched location between the first and second lightening hole, and then two 3/8" holes in the left wing for pitot and AOA, On the right wing, we'll probably do one 3/8" hole part-way through the wing to accomodate trim/AP servo wiring.

Not many pictures from today, but here's what we have:
The first batch of wing ribs primed.

The six brackets mentioned earlier, all riveted together and ready to go!


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