Saturday June 28, 2008
Wing Potpourri
(0.8 Hours Ailerons, 5.8 Hours Wings)
6.5 Hours Total

Today, I did a little bit of everything, including making yet another big mistake.

While I waited for Emily's help with riveting, I used my soldering gun to deblue the edges of the aileron skins and then deburred them.

Then, Emily came out to the garage and helped rivet the main wing ribs to the main spar. We lifted the wing onto the jig and I spent a while leveling it and clamping it in place. Looks good!

Then, I started working on the wing walk doubler. While trimming it out of the overlarge sheet material, I had a brain fart and trimmed the width to 9" instead of 9 3/8". It's too short now to give comfortable edge distance to the rivets on the outboard rib in the wing walk. So I'll be ordering some more sheet aluminum for the doubler.

Since that prevented any further progress with the wing, I clecoed the leading edge ribs into the leading edge skin in the cradle. That'll save some time down the road.

Casting about for something I could work on, I then set to work on the aileron hinge brackets. They come in their own nifty little kit with drawings. Here are the right wing's two brackets clecoed together.

Outboard, clecoed to the right wing for drilling.

And inboard.

Primed the mating surfaces of the angle, since they aren't alclad.

And finally, I assembled them and riveted them to the wing permanently. Here's a view of the outboard bracket.

Another pic of the outboard bracket. I had a bear figuring out how to squeeze some of these rivets. I should have just shot and bucked some of them, probably.

Here's the inboard bracket. You have to be very careful with the rivet callouts. There are also a few places where you use flush rivets rather than universal.

Final picture of those darn brackets... These things are SOLID and definitely aren't going anywhere.

Tomorrow, I should be able to install the flap brace and aileron gap faring on the right wing. I'm so mad at myself for the mistakes the last two days that force me to stop work on those components. Just a little more care would have avoided the delay (and extra cost).

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