The one thing you want to be really careful of is the outboard end of the flap hinge pins. If it goes too far it'll block the aileron bracket. If you find your aileron doesn't have enough up travel, the first place to check is the flap hinge pin, to see if it's sticking out too far. Securing the pins at the center seems ideal for this reason, to keep the pin from drifting toward the aileron. Van gives you a choice as to how you install and secure the flap hinge pins, either from the aileron end in one piece, or two pieces from the center. There is zero doubt in my mind that the two pins at the center is the way to go.
Let the sanding begin. I used 60 and then 240 grit to smooth out the first batch of epoxy/micro filler. It's at a point now where I'm ready to lay a very thin ply of fiberglass, either 0.7oz or 1.45oz (TBD), over the gap to make sure it never cracks the paint. I'll do that and then fill over it, feather it out, etc. It's going to be an iterative process.
Here's the VS tip joint. It's incredibly tempting just to paint it as-is, but I know in years to come this joint will end up rearing its ugly head if I don't glass over it. No sweat.
Here's a closeup of one of the elevators. The area where the skin doubles over the counterweight arm is where it will need the most TLC to get it to look flat and smooth. But as far as the rivets and the gap are concerned, they're gone.
Later I worked on the pitot tube. First I installed the mount permanently.
Then I trimmed the wires and soldered on the pins (sockets, actually) that come with the pitot heat connector. Tinning and soldering these while they hung out of the wing wasn't exactly the ideal work area, but hey...you only do this once and then it's done.
Here's the pitot heat connector, which is just two halves of molded plastic screwed together around the sockets.
E voila. Like the holy grail, this chrome bastard shines across the hangar and you cannot miss it. I didn't want chrome, but I think there was no choice at the time.
Next I connected the pitot tubing. What I did was use about a foot of 1/4" aluminum tubing as a heat sink from the pitot tube (which gets scorching hot by the way!!!). From there I transition to polyethylene tubing via a short chunk of silicone 1/4" ID tubing and some small hose clamps. From there, it's one contiguous piece of poly tubing the whole way up to the panel.
Next I trimmed and connected the small coax leads for the ACS2002 and Princeton adapters to the fuel tank capacitance senders. The fuel system is officially ready for calibration!
Last I worked on the landing light circuits. It was easy. I enlarged the tooling hole in the end nose rib to 1/4" and put a rubber grommet in. I just ran the landing light wire through there, connected it to the J3 (or whatever) bulb lead, and heat shrunk over it so it won't short if it touches whatever. So far I haven't installed any dedicated ground wires for the landing lights. My feeling is that since they're installed in an aluminum structure that's screwed to the wing, what more local ground do I need? I'm leaning toward keeping it very simple and omitting the short ground jumper wire to the spar.
So after wiring the landing lights of course I had to try them. They work awesome, as does the progressive transfer switch. Up one position, left light goes on ("taxi" light), up another click and they're both on (the right is the "landing" light proper). I'll adjust the two lights accordingly, but I'll most likely run with both on solid when taxiing.
As you may recall, I integrated a solid-state flasher and a second "wig-wag" switch. The idea is that I can have one, both, or both lights flashing for a higher level of recognition (you can't miss the flashing setup). Anyway, when I flipped the wig-wag switch on, both lights went out. Greeeeeeat. Up until now, I haven't had a single wiring issue whatsoever. Everything has just worked perfectly from the get-go. But now I had my first "gremlin." I got out the multimeters and test lights and all that crap and started poking around the system. I debugged my wiring and that looked absolutely perfect at the switches, at the fuse blocks and all the way to the flasher unit. Everything was connected, no shorts, it was all fine. So what the hell is up? Must be a blown out flasher unit, right? Nope. I went back and consulted the installation diagram for the flasher (SSF-1 from B&C, by the way), and it turns out I had wired it incorrectly. I should have taken a photo but I forgot. Anyway, there are three fast-on terminals on the thing. Two are parallel, and one in the middle is perpendicular. I guess I brain farted when I wired it, but I just assumed that the middle perpendicular terminal was the power source, and the two other parallel terminals were the alternating loads. Wouldn't that make sense? Nope...one of the parallel terminals is the power source. Swapped two wires and bam! The thing works like a charm. My electrical system is back to 100%.
The right light is aimed too high and the left light is aimed too low...it's a little tough to align 'em when you first install the suckers -- leading edge off the wing sitting on the bench and all. They're easy to adjust, though. I'll do that at some later point in time.