Wings 1
1/10/2006 6 Hours
Finally! Some wing work. Well, it had to get done sooner or later, and with Dave being here and the wings being somewhat of a two man job, it'll be a big help to get them done in the next week. So, here goes. We decided to tackle some easy bits first to break ourselves in. Here we cut the pushrods to length and primed the insides.
An assortment of loose wing bits we need to fit. On the quickbuild, this is pretty much all there is to do. Not much really, but still took us a while!
Here's Dave riveting the pushrod end caps in.
While we were mucking about with some wing stuff, Dave decided it was time to clean the hangar. And a mighty fine job he did. Now I'll never find anything! Especially when he goes back to Australia. I'm going to be on the phone all the time..... "Where's this? Where's that?!!!" Anyway, now we have some room to actually put the wings on the plane, which is more than can be said for the state the hangar was in before. Of course, we've got to get the wings done to put them on. Are you done cleaning yet Dave?!
A finished pushrod. We'd done them both by this time. The other one was still hanging up in the paint booth.
Here's how we did our aileron pushrods. Everybody struggles with bending rivets for this. Not us! It helps if you make them the right length first. They're way to long. Get out your rivet gauge and trim 'em down a bit on a belt sander. Then put some tape on the rod to help grip it. Get a holder person (Dave in this case) and hammer them down in the C-Frame dimpler (the rivets, not the holder person!). Easy.
The finished result. Lovely.
Next we went ahead with the aileron brackets. These pretty much go where the holes are and that is that. Simple task of match drilling and deburring and rivetting.
The other wing.
Both wings sitting on the cradle. Actually getting some attention after all these years.
This is the inboard bracket for the ailerons. Again a simple task to match drill, deburr, rivet.
Mike stopped by yesterday and took our aileron bellcrank bushings to ream out on his lathe. We picked them up this morning so we could finish up the bellcranks.
First thing we did was the flap and aileron braces. We had to drill out a few rivets to put these on. Why they didn't leave them off on the QB we'll never know. It's not like it's extra work or anything! Squeezing these rivets on the rear spar for the aileron fairing was entertaining, as we didn't quite have the throat on the squeezer. Still, we made it work.
Here's the flap brace clecoed in along the skin edge and riveted to the spar. On the quick builds you have to use blind rivets because the wing has already been closed up at this end. We only have one skin to rivet, which is nice.
Here's the outboard aileron bracket. These were a lot of fun to tighten up thanks to no tool clearnace. How hard is it to make room for a socket?!
The inboard bracket. I made all the spacers necessary for these to be assembled to the wings while Dave made some aileron travel stops. Twice.
Here's the outboard, attached.
And the inboard one attached.
Here's an aileron bellcrank we made earlier. Here, you can see the fixture jig thing used to set up the aileron in trim. We'll tighten all these bolts someday.
I let Dave loose with the rivet squeezer, even though he can't be trusted with it. We got the flaps lined up with the ailerons and sorted out where the hinge needed to be. Here, Dave is wrapping up the rivetting for the hinge piece. It all worked out really nicely.
Oooo... Time to chop off half the reaqr spar attachment. Here it's marked out. I can't remember double checking it before we pulled out the hacksaw though! Too late now!
Here's Dave's punishment for leaving me to do all this on my own for so long. 3 YEAR OLD PLASTIC PROTECTION FILM! Ha! It took him a LONG time to get this off that skin. Does he know he's got to do the other side too?!!!
While he was peeling away, I started working on the pitot mount. We bought the Gretz mount kit, and a standard AN heated pitot. Luckily, we bought ours way before they became gold dust, so we got ours for about $400 back in the day.
So, at the end of today, we almost have a completed wing. We still need to do a few little things (like putting the wing skin on), but hopefully, we'll get that done tomorrow.