Wings

Had a few of the first spring storms roll through the area tonight and didn't feel like chancing it by embarking on a non-stop 3-hour commitment with proseal. So instead, we had a pretty easy night continuing on Section 20 with the wing bottom skins. I had previously clecoed the gap fairings into place, so we made quick work out of final-drilling all the #40 fairing-to-top-skin holes on both wings. Still need to do all the #30 fairing-to-rear-spar holes, because apparently changing a drill bit was beyond our motivation at the time.

Also, we hung the bottom skins and started clecoing everything into place. This is definitely reminiscent of the top skins!

R bottom skin starting to be clecoed into place

L bottom skin starting to be clecoed into place

Last thing from tonight was I decided to cut out the hole for the pitot mast. I have the SafeAir pitot mast from Avery tools (link here) and have also bought the Garmin GAP26 heated pitot/AOA. I've decided to mount it in the #2 bay inboard from the tip, using the outboard-most 3 rivets within that bay. The mast comes with a template that helped position everything and draw a cutout line and two drill holes in the skin, although I feel like the template was at about 95% scale of the real thing. That didn't affect much, except once I had the hole cut out I had to run another pass with the dremel to enlarge it again so the mast would actually fit. I didn't take any pics during the process (oops) but here is the final product, clecoed into place:

Pitot mast clecoed to L bottom skin, second bay from tip

Different angle of the pitot mast installed

The mast is fairly long compared to other models, but I'm not sure if I want to cut it down or not. There is certainly enough clearance to work with, and I'm figuring the farther the pitot is from the wing, the less error will be induced. Most likely we'll leave it as-is.

Probably take Friday off from building as usual, Saturday probably get through at least one more bottle of proseal, and then maybe Sunday do some final pre-baffle installation prep, including plumbing the vent line, rivet QA/redos and installation of my home-brew capacitance probes. Oh yeah, and we still have to prime the external tank parts like the zees, half the inboard support bracket, and a small handful of miscellaneous parts. Maybe we'll throw the wing gap fairings into the batch too while we're at it. I have some work travel planned early next week, but hoping to have the tanks done by the following weekend!