Wings 6
6/18/2006 7 Hours
Some more wing work today. It's time to start wrapping things up in general, which also means doing some fibreglass work (ugh!).
I started by mounting the Nav/Strobe lights. The front hole needed to be about an inch and a quater for the light to sit flush. These things look pretty ugly to me. I wish we had something a little nicer like the Glasairs do with coloured plexi.
And the left side. Something I noticed was that the seam lines were different left to right. Don't use these as a measurement guide when mounting your lights!
Time for some metalwork! I hate fibreglass! I had made an Archer style antenna a while ago from parts given to me by Cameron, but we needed another for the second comm. It needed to be a duplicate basically, so I trimmed up all the bits and riveted them together. This one was made out of an old trim tab skin from Cameron's plane, and also from some phenolic that Cameron gave me.
I had Lucy come down the hangar early to pick me up. Little did she know I was going to put her to work! Here she's assembling the screws for the antennae.
After she'd done that, I had her trim me some rivets for the other antenna.
The real task I needed her for was the wing tips. I'd tried to do one on my own, but gave up before even drilling them. This is definitely a two person job, because you need to push the wing tip forward as much as possible while you drill it. Starting at the front, and working your way rearward. If you do it this way, you end up with it looking pretty nice. I had to trim my flanges about an eight of an inch to make them fit right, and I had to trim a bit near the aileron too. I deliberately left a little extra so I could tune the gap between the aileron and the wing tip.
Here you can see better what I'm talking about. The gap is about an eigth of an inch. I'll open it up to about three sixteenths along here. I also have a bit of a wingtip overhang. I think this is pretty normal for these planes. I guess I'll be trimming this then and doing some layups inside to give it back some strength. The left side was a little less, but not much less.
Here's an overall shot with the wing tip on. Sweet! Of course, now it's even more walking around the plane! It's getting tight in the hangar!
Here's the left side. Much the same as the right. It seemed to go a bit easier this side though. Maybe I'd just got used to doing it! Now I have to remove them, and start fitting the nutplates, wiring the lights, and fitting the antennae.
7/2/2006 7 Hours
Today was pretty hot and humid, so progress was a bit slow really. Clayton came by and help me get one of the wing tips almost done.
We wrapped up some of the wiring for the nav & strobes. Cut the wires to length and installed the connectors.
Here we're just over halfway through the job. We need to buy some two way mate-n-lok connectors for the nav light connection. The antenna wire on this wing is for Com 2.
Next, the nasty stuff. It was time to get dirty. I sanded the rear edges of the wing tips to match the ailerons. This wasn't really too bad, and there's still plenty of material along the rear edge to maintain some structural integrity. I drew a line 1/8 inch from the aileron edges for a nice tight gap.
The the wing tips were removed and it was time to start fitting nutplates. There were a lot! So many in fact that Clayton made me make a drilling jig! It was a good job we did really, otherwise we'd still be drilling holes now! We made some 9/16" wide backing strips for the nutplates to rivet too, and to help support the fibreglass a bit. I don't know why, I'm just not that trusting of fibreglass for some reason! Maybe that's why we're building a metal plane!
Intense concentration, riveting onthe nutplates and backing strips. We put resin on the wingtips and backing strips first, so this job was a little messy.
Once the nut plates were on, Clayton applied some "peanut butter" flox mix to the strips just to make sure.
We didn't forget the antenna here either! I have to order some blue foam stuff to glass into the wingtip to hold the antenna in a more vertical position for comm's vertical polarisation. The antenna here is mounted on the top surface of the wingtip.
That was about all we had time for. This should set up pretty quickly with these temperatures. We didn't get chance to put the wingtip rib in place. That'll have to come later.
7/23/2006 3 Hours
It's been a long time since I updated the site, mainly because not much has happened! Two weekends ago, we had friends over form Chicago for the weekend, and the weekend after that it was too hot and humid to be working in the hangar.
So, we finally got to the hangar again to get on with wingtips, and then two strangers showed up from Germany! Andreas and Wolfgang were here on a business trip, and dropped by to see if anybody was around. It turns out that Andreas had been checking my progress on the web in Germany, and is planning on building an RV-7, so I was happy to answer any questions. We ended up spending the whole day hangar flying and checking out the plane, tools and all kinds of other things. It was quite a lot of fun!
I've missed having Cameron and Mike around to chat with. Clayton has been doing a great job of filling in for them though!
Andreas and Wolfgang managed to wangle some of their trip to include a business visit to Green Bay, WI. Now isn't that convenient?! A short drive to Oshkosh! I gave him a BIG shopping list of things to buy! We'll probably meet up there for some beers one evening.
Clayton did actually do more work on the plane this weekend than I did! He made some reinforcement strips for the right wing tip, and started match drilling them to the tip and drilling them for the nutplates. We forgot to take pictures too, but it's all the same as the above stuff.
I ordered some foam to reinforce the wingtips, as they're a bit flimsy. We'll glass it in, and then attach the tips to the plane so the epoxy sets up in the correct position.
Oshkosh here we come! Really looking forward to it. Seeing friends old and new will be nice.
Today was the first day of Thunder Over Michigan, so the airport was very busy! I eventually got in to my hangar after moving a line of people out the way that was blocking the gate!
I went to work on wingtip stuff again. I can't find my CF card for my camera, so it all went wrong today as far as pictures are concerned.
The wing tips are a bit flimsy in places, so I decided I would add some reinforcement foam. I cut some 1"x1"x36" pieces of urethane foam to epoxy in to the tips. First though, I had to make sure that the screw holes were clear on the left tip from when we bonded the strips on with the nutplates. I cleaned them up, chased the threads of the nutplates, and set about positioning the foam. Then I spread out some epoxy in the wingtip, put some on the foam and laid it in place. Then I put the wing tip on the plane so that the resin would set in the right position.
While that was drying, a did a bit of cleaning around, and set up all the V speeds in the EFIS One. I also cut up some bits of fibreglass to lay up on the foam, and prepared the wing tip ribs to be put in to place.
After a lot of messing around, I took the wingtip off and went to work laying up the cloth. Looks like this might work out OK. Once it's dry, it should be pretty good reinforcement. Then I match drilled the wing tip rib, and fitted it. I put the wing tip back on the plane so it sets up correctly again.
After all that, the day was practically over. I don't know why it took me so long, but it took me a while to get back into it after being away from theprject for so long.
I got my seatbelts from Van's, so I put them in position to see what they looked like. More time wasting!