Wings – Structure

Wings 41 (4.0 hrs)

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The first order of business today was to clean up the shop from yesterday’s battle with the landing gear. Today I was hoping to work on the bottom skins.

My buddies Jack and Matt were on hand to help. The first thing I needed to do was deburr and dimple the bottom skins where they attached to the flaps. Next I used RTV to secure the conduit to the ribs. This is important because overtime vibration and movement can cut through the conduit. I may go back once my new proseal arrives if the RTV looks like it might be weak. I probably could have been a little more prepared for this weekend.

  

Then we started riveting the bottom skins. The first step is to rivet the rear spar at the wing walk ribs. This requires a little dexterity. Vans advises that you work outward and forward in an L pattern. By far the worst are the rivets towards the rear spar on the wing walk doublers. 

We were only able to get about half of the left wing’s inner skin done. The going was very slow with all the awkward angles. Van’s says this can be done by one person. I sure don’t see how! 

In addition to cramping up a couple times, my arms are rather sore at the end of the day. I’ll need to drink more water next time.

Wings 40 (2.0 hrs)

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In this session I worked to finish the bell crank routing. I received my new conduit so I added that to the mix. In the first photo you can see I decided on an amalgamation of the ideas I had previously toyed with. I have complete clearance of all tubes regardless of the orientation of the bell crank. This includes two areas at the extremes of bell crank movement indicated with the arrows. 

As you can see there is clearance on both ends.  

I created two brackets that will affix where the bell crank mounts to the spar. One for the green tube and one for the conduit. I used an adel clamp for the blue tubing.      

It might look convoluted, but there is very little stress on any of the tubing… gentle turns. And more importantly there is absolutely no interference with the bell crank under any circumstance. Its important to note that the travel of the bell crank will not be a large when connected to the ailerons, and so I have even more clearance than shown here.