Finished the Wings!

The wings are finished! Wow it feels good to type that. Things were busy this weekend. My birthday was Friday, July 12, and what better way to spend your 30th birthday than skipping work and building your airplane? Or more importantly finishing the wings to your airplane. Jess took the day off as well and helped all day Friday. It was her first time using a rivet gun and she got the hang of it pretty quickly. The lower skins are a lot of work. You're on your knees crawling around on the floor sticking your arm into the wing and stretching to reach the rivet while holding the bucking bar and straining your shoulder muscles to push against the rivet while it's being bucked (that sentence is as long as the work is uncomfortable). Then repeat another 1.3 million times for all the other rivets.....it's exhausting. Despite the nicks, bruises, and soreness it feels great to have the wings completed!

Wed July 10th - 1.0hr - Installed aileron actuation torque tubes
Fri July 12th - 6.0hrs - Jess helped all day. We completed the upper row of rivets and most of the rivets on the ribs down to the J-channel on both wings
Sat July 13th - 4.5hrs -  Just kept riveting.
Sun July 14th - 7.75hrs - Finished riveting skins. Deburred, dimpled, installed inspection panels.
Mon July 15th - 1.5hrs - Finished odds and ends. Safety wired auto pilot roll servo. Installed bell cranks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pitot Mast is installed. I'm going to wait until later to install the pitot tube. There's less chance of damage to the pitot if it's tucked away on a shelf instead of hanging out waiting to get snagged in the shop.

 

 

 

 

 

I dinged the J-Channel with the bucking bar while riveting. (Sucks, but the show must go on.) The dent on the outside is hardly noticeable and it's on the lower skin so that's even better. I inspected as best I could for any cracking but did not find any. I don't think a repair is required and I could've just moved on, but for ease of mind I decided to make a little doubler channel. It took maybe 5 minutes and now my mind is eased.

The autopilot roll servo is installed and safety wired. This is my second attempt at my first safety wire job. Turned out pretty nice I think. Also the bell cranks are installed and torqued. I had to "polish" the inside of the bell crank tubes so they would freely rotate on the bushings.  I used a small roll of sandpaper wrapped on a drill bit and spun on a drill. Worked really well and very quickly.

                     

 

 

                   

RH Wing complete.

                   

LH Wing complete.

Pitot, Lower Skins, and a Fuel Tank

It's been productive around here...I really want to finish these wings.
Tue 18th  - 1.5hrs - Started aileron actuation section, cut and drilled long pushrods
Wed 19th - 1.25hrs - Drilled RH lower skins
Fri  21st   - 2.5hrs - "Deburr Party" deburred all lower wing skins
Sat 22nd  - 5.5hrs - worked on pitot mount, worked on pushrods
Sun 23rd  - 6.5hrs - Primed parts, installed RH Fuel Tank, riveted pitot mount, worked on push rods

Total time for this post = 17.25hrs 

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My Dynon stuff arrived! It was like Christmas in June.

I received the heated/AoA pitot tube, it's controller box, the autopilot roll servo, mounting bracket and wiring kit. Everything look to be of very high quality. Really nice pieces of equipment....good job Dynon!

The servo just has 7" or so of wire coming from it, nothing has a connector installed. So my first order of business, with my new avionic,s was to install the connector on the servo and on one end of the wire bundle. The wire bundle will run down the conduit I installed in the wing and therefore one end of the wires need to remain without a connector installed to fit through the conduit. Having never installed a connector and it's pins before I recruited Mike, a coworker and friend of mine who happens to be an electrical engineer dealing with avionics integration everyday, for help. So I walked down the hall to Mike's office for a lesson on pinning connectors. Turns out it's really easy and we finished the job on our lunch break.        

No problems installing the connectors to the servo.

Drilled out the RH lower skins.

Installed the RH Fuel Tank.

 

Friday night the wife and I had a "Deburr Party", yep it's what you think it is, you stand around and deburr wing skins into the wee hours of the night. Of course the party can't get started until the baby is sleeping. Grab the monitor and sneak out to the shop, she'll never know we were gone : ). We finished all of the lower skins in a single night!

I got a lot of the aileron actuation section complete as well. I cut and primed the push/pull rods and attached the ends, which I etched and alodined, looks nice.

 

 

I needed to mount the pitot controller near the pitot tube so I made a mounting plate to attach to the rib. It rivets into place using four 470AD4 rivets which minimizes the size of the holes cut into the rib. The controller then screws into place using four #6 screws into the nutplates. There are two angles attached to the back to stiffen the plate and provide attachment points for Adel clamps to hold the pitot and AoA lines and wiring. The power wires run from the bottom of the controller and are held in place by an Adel clamp mounted on a spacer to the hole on the lower side of the mount (LH side of the picture below). More pics of the installation will come later when I get everything finished up.

Here is the single picture I have of the install more pics will follow when I finish up the wiring and such...kinda looks like a mess right now.