Wings

This weekend finally finished the wings. They had come to me basically complete as quickbuild, but we needed to put in all the wiring and other items we needed in there before closing it up. Fairly simple, after a lot of off-plans work it was refreshing to come to a section where we could just follow the plans for the most part. For the right wing, with the amount of wires I had to run for the GSA28, the Ziptips, and the antenna I had to put in a whole new conduit. Tried multiple things. The standard wire conduits for cars won't work because there's enough movement through the ribs that wiring gets caught on the ribs when you try to feed it through. What I found was a good product was a 3/8" tube for fish tanks, totally smooth on the inside and very light. I tried multiple different methods of securing the conduit, from RTV to Lord Adhesive, and they all failed after a bit of movement to them. I will return to this area during final assembly and probably ziptie the conduits down to a couple of ribs in between to help secure it.

Riveting the bottom wing skin was very straight forward, although the plans could be a little more clear. We followed the plans very literally for the right wing and riveted the bottom wing skin aft to forward, row by row, which made the row of rivets to the main spar a pain to get to. On the left wing we just riveted it from the middle outwards, column by column. Much easier and basically doable with one person.

I terminate all my wire runs using Deutsch Connectors and then loaded the wing, cradle and all into a truck and moved it to the airport. A Penske 16ft truck will just about fit, but getting it up the ramp is difficult and the angle makes it likely you'll hit the top. We had to use our engine hoist to lift one end of the cradle so the entire cradle + wing assembly could go in horizontally.

Now off to transparencies and interiors!

Here's the wings sitting in the hangar: