Wings Installation! (4)

4 hours

I rented another trailer and got some of the boys from work to come help me on a Friday afternoon.  Initially we thought we'd lay the wings flat on the trailer with some padding, but ended up changing our minds and just strapped the whole wing rack on.  Luckily it's only about a 10 minute drive to the airport on city roads so nothing too crazy.

I don't have a specific picture of it, but before we put each wing all the way in, I installed the Van's wing root gasket over the edge of the doubler sheet that I previously had trimmed along the side of the fuselage.  The gasket seems to fit well but made it surprisingly hard to push each wing the last 1/4" or so into position!

We did the left wing first, since the left spar sits in front of the right spar, and I needed to install the main spar pins from the front since the seat blocks access to the rear of the spar tunnel.  I think this contradicts the wing installation instructions somewhat.  The left wing wasn't too hard; we just had to wiggle and push on it quite a bit to get both pins started.

The right wing was a pain.  It was a really tight fit!  I guess that's a good thing though.  It was easy to get it about this close to lining up with the other holes:

That last little bit took a lot of effort though.  I didn't consider this but I should have brought some grease and a mallet for the pins, because there's a lot of friction from the weight of the wings unless they're supported absolutely perfectly, so the pins were hard to push in even when the holes were lined up just right.  We borrowed a small rubber mallet from a hangar neighbor and that helped a lot to tap the pins in.

Here is how the connections on the right wing went together.  All the electrical stuff is on that plug, and the pitot and AOA air lines connect to the two bulkhead fittings.  I guess I did a bad job of measuring when I installed the electrical plug on the fuselage, because the plug interfered just a tiny bit with the edge of the big lightening hole in the first rib of the wing.  I just had to file the hole a tiny bit larger and then the wing went in OK from there.  On the left side it's just the electrical plug.

Wings on!!!