Wrapping up the wing bits and pieces over the last three days in prep for starting the spars. Just entered 9th month of project... looking back on the build log, I started cutting aluminum sheet stock for ribs and spars on the 10th of March.
I do a lot of jig building for instrument work, so more of the same for the wing attach, spar join plates, and the filler pieces under the wing strut attach straps. And before someone says it - absolutely not worth it for four of each, but someone down the road will get some awesome tooling when I'm done. Not fond of routing small pieces of relatively thick aluminum or much of anything else, so most jigs I build for that job have a reference surface or two as well as two alignment pins, and are two or sometimes three sided to bring both size and mass up to gain controllability and to Murphy-proof.
Spar join plates were ripped to width and the jig uses those parallel sides as reference for alignment and to beef up the alignment pins.
Alignment pins hold things while the bottom cover goes on and help steady things once clamped up.
Really small stuff gets a big piece of ply to better manage control of the work. I have a lot of 1/2" and 3/4" scrap sheet stock left from all that form and body mold building, so one way of using up stuff too good to send to the dump but too small for use elsewhere.
The plan pattern for the filler strips under the strut attach straps is a little rough, so just easier to take a 4" wide piece of stock and flip end-for end at every pass... temporary stop and alignment blocks tacked to the tapering sled make this a quick job with a 7-1/4" aluminum blade. The filler pieces are about 0.9" wide at one end, and the saw kerf is 0.096", so little waste.
Ready for edge clean-up, but that can wait until the fittings start going on the spars.
Other progress:
- I have a nice 19" bandsaw in the shop, but wanted to segregate the aluminum and steel chips. Picked up an ancient 4 speed Reliant from 1996 for about $200 (it had a very nice US-made 1 hp TEFC 56 frame motor, so worth it just for that). After brazing a cracked lower guide casting and the usual overhaul on guides, alignment, tires, link belt install, and building up a mobility base, I was out about a week of evenings, but had a pretty decent metal saw. Lowest speed is still too high for blade life cutting steel, but I have a couple sheaves that should do the trick.
- Still destroying steel tubing and flat stock doing the self-taught stuff for OA welding. Hope to get lined up with one of the EAA chapter OA weld gurus over the next month so that I can get the wing weldments (drives, hinge, etc.) knocked out by the time the spars are ready to go into the wing assembly jig.
Normally that booth is used for aerospace mil-spec whatever coatings. This Stewart's is probably the mildest stuff that booth has ever seen.
