I haven’t posted many pictures lately because there is really not much to show for the work over the last few days.  I finally finished fluting the wing ribs tonight.  This is really hard on your hands, so you can’t work for long stretches.  Anyway, it’s done now.  All I have to do is debur the edges and lightening holes and I can get the wing structure up on the wing stands.

I finished deburring the ribs tonight and then drilled holes for the wing conduit.  I made a simple paper template with marks to align with a couple of the bends and the flange of the rib and then center punched the spot.

I then drilled these out to #12.

And finally to 3/4″.  A number of builders drill the intermediate holes to 13/16″, but the conduit can be worked through 3/4″ with a little persistence.  As you can see from this wider shot, I’m putting the conduit where Van’s recommends (in the lower 1/3″ of the rib between the lightening hole and the reinforcement.

I finally clecoed the left wing together.  As other builders have said, it feels so good to finally see some structure go together after many many hours of fluting and deburring the wing ribs.

The obligatory shot through the lightening holes for posterity.

I also took a shot through the conduit holes so you can see how well these align even with just a simple paper template for positioning.  I’ve seen a number of builders spend a great deal of time building a template that aligns with the tooling holes in the ribs to ensure precise placement of the conduit holes, but this is rather pointless as the conduit is very flexible and even a simple method like this basically produces nearly perfectly aligned holes.

I clecoed the wing structure together and temporarily hung it on the wing stand for drilling.

The wing stand uses 1″x1″x1/8″ steel (with some aluminum flashing tape to keep from scratching the spars).

Here is the outboard end with a scrap of aluminum angle bolted to the last rib as a mounting point.

I didn’t get any shots of it, but I match drilled all of the holes that connect the ribs to the front and rear spars.

I also attached and match drilled the holes that are used to attach the leading edge ribs to the spar.

The last few days have been spent deburring and prepping all of the ribs for priming.  Here are all of the ribs drying after being etched.

And here is a shot of one set of ribs drying after being primed.

I protected the spar bars with some blue tape.  I really should stop using this stuff.  It comes off without leaving any residue on every surface except anodized aluminum.  I had to use some solvent to get all the gunk off the spar after riveting.

We didn’t get any pictures during the process, but my buddy Andre stopped by today and we shot and bucked all of the rivets that attach the ribs to the main spars.  We used a straight set and simply flexed the ribs out of the way while shooting.  130 rivets and not a single smiley or bad shop head.  Here, I’m clecoing the rear spar in place so we can hang up the wings.

Here’s a good shot of the whole wing.  The four closely spaced ribs at the bottom are for the wing walk.  There will be a double thick layer of skin over these four ribs to handle the load of people walking here.

Here are the wings permanently mounted in the cradle.  I still need to level and straighten them, but that will have to wait until another day.  My wife’s heading to Hawaii in a couple of days with a friend and I want to spend some quality time with her before she leaves.

I squeezed all of the rivets attaching the ribs to the rear spars tonight.  Pay careful attention to the rivet callouts because there are a number of holes that must be skipped and there are four different lengths of AN470 rivets used.  Here are a couple of holes that must be skipped where the flap brace rivets to the rear spar.

The outboard ribs attach to the rear spar with AN426 (flush) rivets since the outboard aileron brackets sits on top of this spot and rivets through the 5 open holes just inboard of these rivets.

The weight of the wing causes the middle to sag a bit, so I put a support near the middle of the rib.  This is basically just a piece of steel tubing and some allthread with a washer and nut.  I put a couple of plastic feet on each end to prevent scratching the spar and to prevent it from slipping on the floor.

I stretched a piece of fishing line across the lower set of holes in the spar and adjusted the support until the fishing line ran through the center of all of them.

The wing walk doublers have to be cut from a larger piece of aluminum sheet.

Then positioned under the top wing skin for match drilling.

Here are both doublers match drilled to the top skins.

It’s late, but I just had to see what these looked like clecoed to the skeletons.  I’m really glad I ordered some extra 3/32″ clecoes and I’m really glad I have the pneumatic cleco tool.  I know my hands would be killing me if I had to do this with regular cleco pliers.

Here is a closeup of the overlap between the inboard and outboard top skins.  Before riveting these on for good, I’ll create a slight bevel on these skins to reduce the bulge.

I got started tonight by fine-tuning the lower wing clamps to the point that there is no measurable twist.  I then drilled out all of the skin holes on the top skins (~1000 holes) and this also entailed moving every cleco.

Afterward, I pulled out and attached the lower wing skins.  Here you can see the three access panels that are on the bottom of the wings to make inspecting the wing, aileron control linkage, pitot/AOA, autopilot roll servo, etc. possible.

My buddy Andre stopped by tonight and drilled all of the bottom main skins while I worked on getting the leading edge skins ready to install.  I started with fabricating a simple cradle to hold the skins while fitting the ribs.  This is just a couple of pieces of particle board roughly cut to the shape of the ribs and lined with some old carpet padding I had laying around.  The shape really isn’t that critical since it just needs to help hold the skins closed while you get the clecos in place.

Update: Particleboard is really the wrong material for this as this fixture will take a fair amount of abuse during the build.  Both of these U shaped pieces broke near the bottom of the U while working on my outboard leading edges.  I didn’t need them anymore, so I didn’t fix them, but save yourself the hassle and use plywood.

Andre and I clecoed the leading edge ribs into place and fit the leading edge of the left wing in place.

The innermost rib needs to be fitted with a joint plate where nutplates will mount to help hold the fuel tank.  This was a real bitch since there are no holes in either the joint plate or the rib and the fit is really tight.  After futzing with it for about 10 minutes, I finally got everything in place and drilled a few holes to hold everything in alignment.  The only issue I ran into was one of the holes that attach the rib to the main spar ended up with too little edge clearance.  I doubt it will be an issue, but I’ll check with Van’s just to be sure.

After Andre left, I knocked out the other leading edge in an hour or so.  These still need to be match drilled, but that can wait until tomorrow.

I match drilled the outboard leading edge skins to the ribs and spars.  I didn’t take any pictures since it would look just like the picture from yesterday.  I also drilled out the holes for the tie down ring.  Here is one of the tie down rings partially screwed into the tie down bracket through the new hole.