24 Aug 2004 Mounting the wings
Got the wings on today, with a lot of help from Emmett. Everything went very well – no surprises.
Trying to get the spar holes lined up…
*Now* it’s starting to look like a real airplane!
Look at that beautiful reamed hole. Reamers rock.
Final measurements showed things just within the Van’s recommended 1/2″ of length difference between the wingtips and some point on the tail end of the fuselage. It would have been quite easy to make it perfectly exact, but I didn’t for two reasons:
1) I’m not totally sure the fuselage is exactly straight. Putting on the tail, I found some things that are not perfectly square, so getting a perfect measurement from somewhere on the fuselage is not too easy.
2) I had a choice between the tape measure showing that things are exact, or having the wing spars fitting into the spar box very “neutrally”. In other words, the wings had a natural neutral position in the spar box, which was slightly off of the perfect measurement. I decided that as long as we are within the Van’s requirement for the distance from wingtip to tail, it would be better to have the spar not under load all the time, binding on the spar box.
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