This is an airplane

Friday was a fun day. We were able to get the wings and struts installed to the airplane.

We learned a lot about putting them on. The main hold up was fitting the struts to the strut attach plate on the wing. I had filed them prior to installing the wings, but they were still too tight to easily work with when the blocks/cubes were installed into the strut.

As with most airplane building tasks, patience is definitely the key. There were times y mind jumped to solutions for issues that would have worked, but they would have not worked nearly as well as the solution that came from having multiple people think about the best way to overcome it.

Fitting the forward strut to the fuselage was a lot less painful than I had imagined it. We went at it with a Dremel with a cutoff wheel to get it close and then used files to go the rest of the way and radius the edges so the spar could slide onto the fuselage. We did this all with the wing attached at the aft spar and resting on 6 ft ladders with some foam. This allowed us to quickly test fit the spar and then move it out of the way to continue to remove material from the fuselage.

I highly recommend making a bushing to drill an initial hole through the forward spar. I had bought some 3/8″ steel tube with an ID of 1/4″. This pinned the spar into place as it should be. Then we removed it and slid a 3/8″ bit through the spar and fuselage. Once it was in place, we put the drill chuck onto it and drilled the 1/4″ hole out to 3/8″. It worked great.

If anyone has questions, let me know. I don’t have a ton of detailed photos for this unfortunately. It was about a 7.5 hour job for us which included lunch and spending a lot of time slowly filing the strut attach blocks so they would fit onto the wing. Another area we had to lightly file was the block that attaches the forward strut to the fuselage. We had to take material off of the bottom curved section in order to get a bolt through it and the fuselage.

It’s getting closer.

(9 hr – An extra 2 hours because I went to the hangar early to try and make sure everything was ready 🙂 )

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c825K8wJKU]