January 11, 2006

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.