August 18-20, 2020
I spent a few days redoing the right wing conduit. Previous posts highlighted that I had accidently installed the conduit near the upper skin instead of the lower skin. This interfered with the aileron push rod and had to be corrected. Since we already riveted on the lower wing skin, it was extremely hard to get to the mounts and drill new holes for them. Everything was held in with stainless fasteners and plastic washers to prevent corrosion so the first step was to remove the old mounts. This took every extension I had and the longest screw drivers I could find, but eventually I got all the old hardware off.
There wasn’t anything really interesting about this, just a screw-up I had to go fix. A mix of right angle screw drivers, 12″ long drill bits and a lot of scratches on my arms and I got this moved toward the lower skin and called it day.
After that I moved on to how to keep the flap piano hinges in place. Van’s suggests just safety wiring them around the flap brace, but that didn’t sit well with me. I made up some brackets and bought some dual brake line hold down clamps. I think this is a much more elegant way of making sure the piano hinges stay in place.
-Paul
(Total Build Time: 552.6)