Tuesday--wings & flight controls

Hello all, happy Tuesday!

We made a big push on the plane today but are not quite done yet!  Today's focus was mostly on the wings and flight control surfaces, with a lot of random work done...well, because it was there!

Here are some photos:

Today we got right to work putting the wings on.  Before that we had to prepare the wing struts.  This is the left wing strut, with the electrical & antenna cables run back through it.  for paint, all the wires were disconnected and stored inside the fuselage.

Here Tracy and i are fixing the strut placement.  In truth, Matt--one of the Glasair employees--was directing the show, and i had time to take this picture when he scampered off to get the correct bolt.

Part of our finished airplane is speed fairings for all the surfaces.  This fairing covers the top of the strut.  The fairings reduce drag around some of the otherwise aerodynamically awkward pieces of the plane.  In addition to the fairings, you can clearly see the aluminum L-bracket on the inboard strut bolt.  Its purpose?  Simple--it's a tie-down point for the airplane.

Once the wings were on, we reattached the flaps and ailerons.  This is easy in concept but difficult in practice, as the tolerances for these surfaces are around 1/32".  Each aileron has about 20 washers and spacers to make sure all the distances from the bearings & connection points are correct.  It took about an hour per aileron for just 3 bolts and all the accompanying hardware.

After the flight control surfaces went on the wings, we began the wing fold.  The wing fold is to ensure tolerances are still right after paint, and also to hook up the fuel and electrical lines (they are easier to manipulate with the wings folded back).  We will finish this tomorrow.

One of the random events going on today was the installation of the flap position detector switch.  It's the little black square immediately aft of the flap handle track, and has a black wire (sensor) and white wire (ground) coming out of it through the back of the flap handle.  This is part of the Angle of Attack system, which we decided to get for the plane after we started out initial build--that's why it's just going on now.  In addition to pressure sensors in the wings, the AoA includes this flap switch and adjusts its AoA sensitivity based on the flap position.

Okay, one more day down!  There are a lot of little tasks to get done tomorrow, so hopefully i have a lot of pictures.  Keep your fingers crossed for a finished airplane!