Today was the day I hoped to finish everything. First step was to cleco the primed flap hinges in place.

Flap hinges clecoed before riveting

Next step was to rivet them in place. Easy work with the squeezer, but I took my time. No need to sprint to the finish line.

Flap hinge riveted in place

I borrowed Ellen for one last session of wing riveting to get the pitot mast in place. Call me sentimental, but I wanted us to do this last bit together because Ellen has been my constant support through this process.

lap hinge riveted in place

After that, I installed the flaps with temporary hinge pins…and the wings were complete. Holy merde, it’s been a long haul!

Wings complete!

Prepped and primed flap hinges today. No big mysteries here, so no pictures. Getting ready for the final push to finish everything on the wings…

With both flaps fitted and aligned, I match-drilled the hinges to the wing skins and flap braces. Nothing magical here, but following Brad Oliver’s lead I started drilling and clecoing at the ends of each flap and worked my way into the center. Worked great! Once again, no pictures…sorry.

With the left wing skins in place, I jigged the aileron and fitted the flap. Sorry, no new pictures. Use your imagination or scroll up to the Nov 8/9 log entries.

Today was the big day to finish riveting the lower wing skins. Dave Rogers provided his superior bucking skills and we knocked out the remaining three ribs and spar-to-skin rivets in a couple of hours. Yeah, I know it took waaaaay too long to get this whole effort done…but we’re done.

Dave and Dave finishing up wing skin riveting

The guilty parties…me, Captain John, Dave and Mitch at the completion of our work. As is our custom, we adjourned to the Sunset Grill and Tap for well-deserved refreshments.

wing skin rivets complete!

Got the wider hinge material in from Aircraft Spruce – quick, easy and not too expensive. I re-fitted the right flap and checked edge distances. No problem!

Right flap fitted

One complete hinge has two leaves. That covers both flaps. For some unknown reason, I thought the FedEx triangular tube mailing box deserved a picture…so here you go.

New piano hinges for flaps

Plenty of margin on edge distance, but that forward (or lower, in this picture) edge of the hinge will have to be radiused to fit snugly inside the flap brace. Nothing that a few strokes with the file won’t fix.

New hinges on flaps

With the right aileron aileron jigged and aligned, I test-fitted the right flap to see how hard it would be to align the flap and aileron trailing edges. That part wasn’t hard but I did discover that when the flap and aileron TEs are aligned, the flap hinge wouldn’t have sufficient edge distance for the rivets that attach the hinge to the wing. I can’t do a better job of explaining this than Brad Oliver did, so see his website entry for more details.

Bottom line…just as Brad and others did, I ordered a piece of wider hinge material to give the required edge distance.

Continued doing detail work today. The right wing skins are done, so I lubed and installed the bellcrank and connected the small pushrod to the aileron, and installed washers and spacers on the aileron pushrod attach hardware. With that done, I inserted the bellcrank jig provided by Vans.

More artsy photo work

I also fabricated a fixture per the plans to indicate when the aileron is in the neutral position; that’s the wood strip you see in the pic below. It’s simply a piece of wood with two AN bolts spaced to fit in tooling holes in the outboard wing rib. Parallel lines drawn tangent to the bolt holes extend back (or to the top, in this case) and the aileron is neutral when its trailing edge is centered between the lines. I’ve seen other, more complex ways of doing this but the plans approach works fine.

After than, it was a tedious but straightforward process to adjust the small pushrod rod-ends to align the aileron to neutral.

Right aileron jigged

I’m pushing hard to have the wings done and out of the shop before the December holidays. I really don’t want to be moving the wings around outside in the snow. So I’ve scheduled Dave Rogers and John Sannizzaro to help me get the left wing outboard skin done in one marathon session. So until that’s done, I’m doing a bunch of clean-up stuff like fitting bellcranks and pushrods.

Because I’m using the SafeAir pitot mast and a heated AN-5812 pitot tube, I can’t follow Vans’ instructions on routing the pitot line. If you look a little earlier in this page, you’ll get all the details on how I decided to use both solid aluminum and plastic pitot lines. When I final-fitted the bellcrank with the solid pitot line in place, I found out that I have some rubbing between the line and the bellcrank pivot.

So…I had to remove the existing hard line and hand-bend a joggle into a new piece of tube, then fit that into the wing. What a pain in the ass. I used a Click-Bond tie-wrap anchor, attached with structural adhesive, to hold the joggle in place on the spar web. Problem solved.

Re-formed pitot line

Over the last month and a half I’ve been alternating between the wings and fuselage. We’re working our way outboard on the left wing’s lower skin. I tried for a really artsy photo here, but don’t think I got it.

Artsy, huh?

With the skins riveted in place around the pitot mast opening, I test-fitted the mast. Turns out the skin expanded outward a little bit during riveting, so I had to tweak the holes a little bit to get everything to line up. Came out ok…

Pitot mast mounted

Almost done with the outboard skin…

Riveting Left outboard wing skin