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

Ellen likes to leave little notations on the airplane, like here where we drilled out a rivet. If you’re old enough to know the “Oh Nooo, Mr Bill!” reference, you’re just old!

Oh noooooo!

Perseverance pays off, especially for us really slow builders…the left wing’s inboard lower skin is riveted on!

Left inboard wing skin riveted

Finished up the inboard skin on the left wing today. We’ve been slowly working through this process one bay at a time (see the 2 Aug entry).

Riveting skins on left wing