I had two more work trips during the last two weeks, so there isn’t a lot of visual progress to report. This entry is the culmination of bits and pieces of work done around travel and family stuff.

After the front spars were prepped, the next step was constructing the rear wing spars. The first task in this process was deburring the spars themselves and match-drilling aileron reinforcement plates to them. Nothing difficult here, I just followed the plans – with one minor exception.

These reinforcement plates fit snugly up against the rear spar’s upper flange, and I match-drilled the #40 holes on each spar flange and reinforcement plate. The instructions don’t specifically call for dimpling these flanges before the rear spar is riveted together, but it would seem to be easier to do it now while the parts can be dimpled separately…so that’s what I did.

Rear spar reinforcement drilled

Note the aileron pushrod hole cut into the reinforcement plate. The location of this hole is traced onto the plate during match-drilling. A Dremel tool with a carbide cutter makes quick work of “roughing out” the hole, and a sanding drum on the Dremel takes care of the rest.

The rear spars’ attach plates and associated doublers are actually RV-8 parts, and must be trimmed according to the plans.

Rear spar attach plate drilled

After deburring, countersinking and dimpling the reinforcement and doubler plates as required, I alodined them using the always-handy Touch-n-Prep pen.

Rear spar parts alodined