Linas took this shot of me and Jen standing on the wings. Jen was wary of standing on the wing, so I started bouncing up and down and shaking the hell out of the plane. It's solid, no worries.
Absolutely beautiful. The photos don't do it justice.
Ok, here's the rundown. Jen and I started bright and early. I used the stool from my drafting table as a support under the spar at the inboard end. Basically Jen and I lifted the wing, and I put my end on the stool, balancing it, adjusting the stool height just right, yadda yadda. I got up in the cockpit to work with the wires and pitot tubing and stuff. We slowly pushed the wing into place. Jen had to tilt the trailing edge down a little bit to get the angle perfect. No sweat. As we fed the wing into the fuselage, Jen pulled the slack out of the main wire bundle coming out of the conduit, and I took up the slack on the pitot tubing and the pitot heat wire...I pulled those into the cockpit for the time being, just to take up the slack. I spread the F-705 rear spar "fork" and the wing just slid right into place. Jen wiggled the wing tip as I rubber mallet'ed my good old drift pins into place. I then got the close tolerance bolts out of the freezer and pounded them into place. No sweat! There are ten bolts in the front spar on each side.
I jumped out and tweaked the wing until the AN5 bolt went right into place on the rear spar attach point. I then got the front tank mount bolt started, and that was that. The left wing was on.
Linas showed up just as Jen and I were taking a break from the left wing. On the right wing, I had to install some rubber grommets in the tooling holes for the OAT sensor wire. I fed the OAT sensor and wire through the wing root ribs, and I installed sliced grommets in the tooling holes in those inboard four ribs...the rest of the ribs I could reach from the inspection panel (as you can see here) after the wing was on.
The right side was much simpler, since there was no pitot tubing or second run for the pitot tube wire (although the OAT sensor does constitute a second wire run, ok). Jen and Linas managed the wing wiggling as I pounded the bolts into place. No grease, no reaming, nothing. It was much easier than I thought it might be with these close-tolerance bolts. It really says something about the quality of the kit, and about the method Van uses of delivering the fuselage center section with the wings so you get a perfectly match drilled setup. Painless!!!
I spent a while tightening and torquing all of the bolts. There are 34 bolts in total, if you include the 5 AN3 bolts per side that attach the gusset to the side wall.
Since I'm building a taildragger, everything is beautifully accessible. Those building nosedraggers have massive gear weldments in this spot to deal with and work around. The taildragger is really so much simpler all around. Too bad people wuss out of flying them! They're much more fun to boot (oh yeah, and they look way cooler).
So here's the right wing root. As I photographed when I first mated the wings about a year ago, there is extremely little room between the wing root and the fuselage aft of the spar. Maybe an inch tops, tapered to 5/8" with the fuselage curve, then back to 1" or so at the trailing edge. It's way too tight to get in there and do anything functional, like install pitot connections, etc. Here you can see that my relocated wire exit hole worked out fine. It's a slight joggle up and forward to get into the wing conduit, but no sweat. It'll be easy to run new wires if I ever have to do so for some reason.
Here's the left wing root. Same deal, except you can see the pitot heat power wire down below the conduit, and you can see the pitot tubing coming in aft and below the lightening hole. No doubt this is an ideal penetration point for the pitot tubing. If I were doing it again, I would do it exactly like this.
Of course I forgot to snap a photo of the rear spar attach points, but here's one of the front tank support. Sorry about the funny angle. The primed steel bracket attaches to the fuselage and has a slot in the end. The aluminum bracket is riveted to the tank. The drilled head bolt and large area washer are tightened just enough so that the washer can't turn freely. The reason for this design is that in the event the wings get ripped off in a crash landing, the tank will separate easily from the fuselage, just pulling out of the slot here, without rupturing the tank and adding to the fire risk. The safety wire keeps the bolt from loosening. I didn't see anything in the plans about how to safety wire this thing, so I just drilled a tiny 1/16" hole near the edge of the angle. Of course the vent tubing covers up the view of the hole, but you get the idea...it's positioned so that it keeps the bolt from loosening.
After everything was torqued and safetied and everything, I started running the systems. First I installed the OAT sensor. I drilled a 1/4" hole in the main wing skin. I had originally figured the sensor would get installed in one of the inspection panels, but why do that if you can avoid it? If installed in the panel, then you have to deal with it every time you take the panel off. I didn't want to break the wire with a connector if I could help it, so I just installed it in the wing skin. It's just inboard of the rib inboard of the 2nd inspection panel (confusing, I know), and an inch or so aft of the spar flange.
This is the OAT probe that came with the ACS2002. I used a lockwasher and tightened it down.
Next I completed the fuel and vent line plumbing. As you may recall, I fabricated the vent connector tubes about a year ago when I first mated the wings. That was my first foray into complex 3-dimensional bends. No sweat now, but it was a huge deal that day. Still, I'm glad I did it then, because today I was able to simply connect it up and it was done. The fuel tubes, however, I had left to finish now. I had just bent an elbow that went aft through the tank bracket and went straight toward the elbow in the fuselage. So today I bent, trimmed, and flared the fuel tubes and that was that. The fuel system is completely plumbed now and ready for leak and flow tests.
Ok, now for some gratuitous photos to mark the event.
This is my favorite shot.
