I started tonight by making a template (shown in the middle here). I glued the bending template from the RV-7A page to a piece of 1/4″ MDF; cut it out and sanded to the line. I then spent about an hour fine tuning the bend on the left longeron.
Here is the template sitting on the left longeron. As you can see, the far end (rear end) still needs a little fine tuning, but the rest of the bend is within 1/32″ or so and the longeron is pretty close to flat and zero twist. A lot of builders complain that bending the longerons are really frustrating (and Van’s instructions describe it as maddening), but I haven’t found the process too bad at all. If you take your time and make gradual bends, it’s pretty straightforward.
