I sent out a call for help to the members of EAA Chapter 301 for any spare clecos they may have, and they delivered in spades. I need to send a personal thank you to Bob Meer, Rudy Kniese, Darrel Herk, and others for answering the call. Also thanks go to Mel Keuthe and Mike Rettig for responding. This saved me about 250.00 in new clecos, and I now have enough to slam the skins onto both sides of both wings.
Through that experience I got to see Bob's beautiful IFR equipped RV-7A, and Rudy not only gave me some clecos, but also invited me on a flight in his nicely painted Glastar up to KGXY for breakfast last Saturday morning. He even let me fly it most of the time! What a nice flying machine that was. He has the same Infinity grips that I plan to install on my joy sticks, and it was great to be able to get the feel of them during the flight.
Before I get more into the main wing skins, I have some more detailed pics of the process I used to match drill the holes into the wing walk doubler of the right wing, which I could not do until I got more clecos. The first pic shows the beginning of the drilling process after I had positioned the top edge the required 9/16 of an inch from the top of the inboard W702 skin for the right wing:
Note that I started in the middle and worked my way to the top, clecoing every other row as I went, working out any slack in the skin as I went.
Next shows the piece of tape that used to mark the recessed alignment of the edge of the doubler against the wing skin. It also shows the enormous amount of aluminum residue from the drilling that forever threatens to scratch anything that it comes into contact with.
And here is what it looks like when all the holes are match drilled into the doubler and the W702 skin:
With doubler all drilled for the right wing, I deburred the holes on both sides and then proceeded to slap the skins onto the wings. This pic shows the bottom skins of the right wing and the top skins of the left wing. This is due to the opposite directions that I placed the ends of each wing spar. I don't know if there was a reason for this, but so far this is how I intend to work on both wings. One thing I confirmed that I had already pretty much figured would happen is that I will need more light on the other side of the right wing next to the garage wall. It is just too dark back there to see anything.
Kudos to my niece's fiance Steve Lindsay for helping me cleco all the skins in place. He was full of questions about the process and I think he enjoys learning how all this works. Hell, he even said he would go for a ride when I get it finished. He truly has no fear! Thanks for the help Steve!
This next pic shows the detail of the inspection access holes along the bottom of the right wing. The left wing has the same ones. If you read any of my left elevator/trim tab posts you know what the access cover plates look like that will attach to nut plates surrounding these holes. It was interesting to find out that the support flanges that support each of the cover plates are actually joggled from the wing skin. There is no additional sub-support bracket that has to be riveted to the wing skin. That was a nice surprise. Also on the right wing in one extra hole that does NOT appear on the bottom of the left wing. This is the venturi-shaped hole for the naco air vent intake which routes air to the floor vent for the rear seat passenger. a hose connects to the intake and to the air vent on the other end. Nifty setup for that as well.
The inboard (short) skin gets attached to the spars and ribs first, and the outboard longer skin has a row of two rivets that you can see in the above pic toward the center. Remember that you can click on the pics in each post to get a much larger, more clear image. That goes for every pic in this blog. The top side skins go on exactly the same way, except that the wing walk doubler goes on the inboard section under the W702 skin and over the 4 closely spaced ribs. The skins are actually fairly easy to hold and attach, but having a helper for the larger one is definitely plus. the last thing you want to do at this point after all this hard work is drop a skin on an edge - a very expensive and frustrating mistake.
Lastly, I took a pic of the outer web of the tip rib to show that the tooling hole in this rib was NOT widened for any wire bundle tubing or antenna coax or other wires. This hole is left undrilled because it is used to help align the neutral position of the aileron with the wing after those get built. I also took this to show just how nicely the top and bottom wing skins form over the ribs. I am very pleased to see that all that hard work to ensure that the rib flanges were 90 degrees to the web seems to be paying off nicely. Out of 28 ribs, I only needed to nudge a couple of them into place while fitting the wing skins. This is also a testament to how straight I was able to make each rib. Simply amazing when you consider how bowed they were when I first open them out of the box. I have to say I am enjoying this part of the build. Check back with me later when I am trying to contort my body into weird unnatural positions to try to rivet them together, to see if I still feel that way :)
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