June 18, 2006

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.