Right Wing Spar on the Stand.

The factory is slowly but surely coming together. Even with all of the work I have done so far to get the stands ready, ther are still about 8 more holes to drill in the bottom half of the stands. Once I get a feel for where they need to be positioned, I will attach the support angles that will be clamped to the bottom of the trailing edge to ensure that the wings are as straight and untwisted as they can possibly be while I attach the wing skins.

Here is a pic of the left wing spar on the stand with the ribs re-attached to give you an idea of how they will go together.

Then it was on to the right wingtip attach bracket. I'll just show the sequence of photos with no elaboration, since the process was much the same as it was for the left wing tip rib. Clamp - drill - debur-attach.

Still a little tweaking to do on both spars to get it all level, but you have to wait until you load it up first with all the parts. Next steps:

1. Finish deburring the rivet holes on the underneath side of the of the left wing spar
2. Drill and debur all holes for the right wing spar main ribs
3. Make a template for the position of the 3/4" hole I need to drill to feed the conduit through the ribs, drill and debur all those holes, as well as the additional 5/8" holes near the front flange of the ribs I will drill for running additional wires and the AOA and air lines from the pitot tube back to the fuselage. Then yet another set of 5/8" holes in the rear of each rib on one wing only, to accept the wing tip Bob Archer navigation antenna wires. I have given up on the idea of a wing tip comm antenna - just not practical and they don't seem to work very well according to other builders who have tried this. So I will install my 2 comm antennas on the bottom of my fuselage, in between the main landing gear wells, and hope for the best when it comes to communicating with folks while on the ground.
4. Scuff, clean, finish deburring, and prime all ribs
5. Start pounding rivets for the main ribs. The spars will come off the stands for this. I will either be clamping them to the work bench or to the table - I have not decided which yet. Perhaps one spar on each to speed the process a bit.

On the last point, I spent some quality time searching on VAF last night, and I ran across a post that I had actually read before, that is like finding gold in terms of the critical info that one must possess in order to attach the wing skeleton together correctly. Some of the key gotcha areas for this task are trying to buck rib attach rivets without damaging the precious wing spars, and properly securing the work for riveting. Clamping and taping certain areas for protection is absolutely critical here. Lots of folks have trouble with rivet sets vibrating off the AN470 rivet heads causing smilies or worse, and this is mainly due to inadequate clamping of the work.

My biggest area of concern was with the rear spar. I was not sure how I would secure the work if I had already attached the ribs to the main wing spar first, which is also a must do item. This post pretty much explains it all. I will use the squeezer on the rear spar, so securing is a little less of a concern when I get to that point, but it still needs to be done. The information in this post is absolutely 100% essential to ensure a successful wing skeleton assembly. Every tip given in this post is one to live, eat, and sleep by if you want to do it the right way, as told by those that have been there before.

Every once in a while you run into gems of information like this on VAF and in other builder logs that is worth every penny it takes in time and effort to find it. The rules are simple - Secure the work - bucking buddy if possible so both your hands can be on the gun and the rivet set, etc., etc. Great stuff. Hopefully I will be smart enough to follow all this great advice when the time comes. So far so good.

Enough for now. I hope to be priming a lot of ribs over the next weekend.