My work on the plane is usually sporadic and not too much happens, so I decided to sum up the weekend in one post.
It started last Thursday when I drilled out the holes in the strut attach plate to the proper size up at the airport where there is a drill press. Once I had those ready it was time to start drilling into the left spars to attach the plates. I got all the holes drilled in the spars on Thursday and called it a night.
On Saturday, I had some friends come over to provide some assistance and just take a look at the project. It’s not very exciting at the moment. I always learn something when people see me working on stuff which is a good thing. On Saturday we got the strut attach plates all bolted and torqued to the left wing.
With the strut attach plates mounted, it was time to attach some nut plates for the flaps and then embark on a somewhat ambiguous and long journey of installing the trailing edge spar root fittings. It’s mostly ambiguous and long because of my lack of experience in light airplane construction. It turned out to not be that bad, and it was rewarding to have it all finished. The fitting is where the trailing edge of the wing will attach to the fuselage and I figure it’s pretty important. The inside of the trailing edge spar is not round. This coupled with the fact that the holes were slightly misaligned meant I had to grind some material off of the root fitting so it would fit into the spar at the hole locations. I also installed some bushings into the root fitting which were alsod ground to fit the inside of the spar. A long wing channel also had to be mounted to the outside of the trailing edge spar in the same spot as the root fitting. The channel has a stainless steel rivet in the center hole (which is only shown on the wing diagram and not the root fitting assembly) and then two bolts on the outside holes. The hole closest to the root of the spar has a nut plate the has two aluminum rivets and the farthest hole uses a shear nut. This was a time consuming process for me and I took about 4 hours to get it all bolted up. The nice thing is that the root fitting assembly means that I will begin to assemble the wing structure and I will have something to look at besides just two aluminum tubes.
Overall I got a lot of things accomplished I feel like. It will be fun to see the wing starting to take shape as well.
( 7 h )