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[March 1, 2008]


Exciting day today....my Dad came over and we mated up the wings. This took NO time at all. In about an hour we had the fuse moved around and the wings on. I stole a dolly from work for the weekend to help move the fuselage around, and get one of the wings under the fuselage. That really made things easy.


I have basically NO room left in my garage. 10" of clearance on this wingtip.


And about 2" of clearance over here.


I stuffed towels in the lightening holes on the wings to keep the pushrods in the center. Worked great,


I shimmed up the stools just to add some extra support to the outboard wings. I still have some work to do, because from what I read, you are supposed to have the fuselage level without any help from the supports under the wings.


This was the worst part of mating the wings -- the bottom skin of the fuselage cause interference with the bottom skin of the wing. I wedges some extra 032 I had to help the two go together.


I greased up the 4.5" 7/16" bolts and installed them with the drift pins in. Then I went ahead and removed them. One thing I don't get is Van's instructions say to use only 2 bolts per side. Now they also have a PDF on their website (http://vansaircraft.com/pdf/Wing_ Incidence.pdf)that says to use 4 bolts per side. WTF? I think I might pick up some 1/4" bolts to just make sure I can do the best job possible here.


Next I wanted to check out my sweep. I took a point on the aft fuselage skin and measured it to the wings. The right wing had a measurement of 172 3/16" and the left one had 172 5/16" -- 1/8" difference. Here is the right wings space between the spar and the fuse skin -- about 3/64"


And here is the right one -- a little less than 1/4". Well I worked my ass off to try to get the left wing swept back. Nothing going. I got really frustrated and watched a movie.


I went back out and found the culpret. The forward fork on the fuselage part of the aft spar was interfering with the inboard wing rib, as you can see with the mirror. Grrr. I guess I have to take the wings off and file this down.


Doh! Even the instructions tell you to! Funny how you find these little notes in the plans once you already know!

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Last Modified: August 13, 2023