I’ve decided to switch back to working on the wings, so I can finish them up and then move them to a hangar. That should give me a little more room in the garage to finish the tail fairing.
It has been a couple of years since I worked on the wings, and a bit of a saga. My original quick build wings were impacted by the Vans primer problem, and I sent them back. But I had already made up the bottom skin for the left wing, including a cutout and holes for pitot mast and reinforcing. I had started riveting the skin on when the vans primer problem was announced. I carefully removed the rivets, and saved the skin. Then I decided to switch from Dynon to Garmin, which meant a new pitot tube. Unfortunately the hole pattern is slightly different and the screws are different sizes between the two. Since the Gretz pitot mast I have is no longer available for sale, I wanted to keep the original mast and bottom skin, and find a way to make it work.
On closer inspection, the holes are in almost exactly the same place. The different is the screw diameter, with Dynon using something like a 3/16 and Garmin a smaller #6-32 screw.
Because the screws carry a sheer load, and because there is plenty of material supporting the screw, I decided to use something JB Weld to fill the void under the screw heads. I coated the pitot tube mount and the screws in boe-lube and then set them into the filler. In the morning the filler had dried, and I backed the screws out, then cleaned up the filler with a file and some sand paper. I painted the filled area with some powder-coat touch up paint. The finish looks rough, but I’ll worry about it when I paint the plane, eventually.
