Tonight I made a couple more access panels for the wings. I had originally made enough, but I had used one to mount a Dynon pitot heat regulator, which involved drilling and dimpling 4 holes in the panel.
I then added the nut plates to the bottom outboard skin around the access panel openings.
I also countersunk the aileron attach bracket, where the pushrod attaches to the aileron. The pushrod is attached via an AN509-10 countersunk bolt.
Tonight I finished riveting the bottom wing skin. Overall, it all went very smoothly. There are a couple of over driven rivets in there, but nothing that I felt worth removing and re-doing.
Because it’s not possible to see the ship head or bucking bar when setting the rivet, I used a couple of spacers (small blocks of wood taped to the bucking bar) to help brace against nearby rib or spar flanges to help align the bucking bar. It helps to be ambidextrous with the rivet gun, and to have a long reach.
The last two nights I’ve continued riveting the bottom, outboard, left wing skin. Nothing to report, other than a minor issue when I realized the j-channel (short) that was installed by the quickbuilders was not match drilled. This makes sense, because it probably needs to be match drilled through the skin and j-channel. The annoying thing is that Vans doesn’t mention match drilling the j-channel at all in the instructions, so it’s easy to miss this step. Anyway, because I already had the skin half riveted on by the time I realized these holes were not there, I was limited in options, particularly when I comes to dimpling. I match drilled the holes, reamed them to #40, then used my pop rivet dimpler to dimple through the skin. This resulted in just enough of a dimple on the j-channel.
Last night and tonight I got started riveting the bottom skin onto the left wing. With the quick build wings, the inner skins are already riveted, as are the top and leading edge skins, so this one outboard skin is the only one that needs attaching. I had previously match drilled the j-channel, so I could jump right into riveting.
I started by clecoing the skin on and carefully checking the clearance with the leading edge skins. I’ve found that there’s a tiny amount of sag in the wings, which is corrected when the ribs are all aligned and clecoed to the skin. Getting the skin on, and then getting the ribs all straightened out by clecoing everything allows for some checking of clearances. I found that there’s outboard 18 inches of the bottom skin needed about 1/32 of material to be removed, so the skins can butt up to each other with no overlap.
Once I had the skin trimmed and rechecked, I got started riveting. It’s a bit of a stretch by yourself, but totally doable. I made sure to put plenty of padding down on the spar in case I dropped the bucking bar.
After two sessions (last night and tonight), I’m about 1/4 of the way through the riveting. I’m hoping I can knock this out within a week, it just depends on how much time I can spend in the garage.
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.
Today I riveted the j-channel to the bottom wing skin on the right wing.
Today I spent some time riveting the bottom right skin. I was able to rivet all then way up to the j-channel. So far it has been straight forward and no issues, but I suspect it will become increasingly challenging as I get closer to the main spar.
I slipped in the j-channel, making sure to go between the inboard j-channel and the skin, and then clecoed it into position. I then checked the clearance between the j-channel and the rib cut outs, and everything looked good.
Today I clecoed the old left wing bottom skin to the new one, marked out the pitot tube mast mount holes, and then drilled them all. I also made a start of cutting out the mast hole, but didn’t finish that step.
I previously decided to replace the left bottom skin. On my first pair of QB wings, I had riveted on most of the left skin before deciding to replace the wings due to faulty primer. Because I had painstakingly positioned the pitot tube mast mount holes on the old skin, I drilled out all of the rivets and removed the skin before sending the wings back to Vans. I couldn’t reuse the skin because too many of the holes were enlarged.
On the right wing, I match drilled the three holes into the j-channel stiffeners on the bottom skin. These three holes are where the two lengths of channel overlap, and they need match drilling.
Nothing much to report, I had to install and remove the skin to mark the hole positions, and didn’t encounter any issues.
Once the holes were drilled, I deburred and dimpled them.
