22 May 05 - Wingtip Ribs, Nutplates

Interesting. It's been a year since we've kicked off this airplane-building project. Gosh, that seems to inspire some pretty mixed emotions: was sort of hoping to be done by now, but on the other hand, most of me has a pretty difficult time believing that we made it this far.

Anyway, pressing on: what we're working on today is trying to make some progress on the wingtips.

This is an attempt to make a backing plate for some nutplates in the wingtip. We're trying to epoxy this in, here, and it just didn't want to work. Combination of the curve of the fiberglass and the fact that the metal isn't sitting flush made this pretty much just not work, so we'll have to find another way to do this.	Okay, enough with the creativity and back to the plans: testing the fit of the wingtip rib with the wingtip clecoed onto the wing.
Clamped in, drilling it. We're using the rivet fan for the spacing, here.

The rationale for fitting the wing rib with the wingtip on the wing is that the wingtips are so floppy that the shape they have changes as it's moving around. When the shape changes, where you think the wingtip rib should go changes, too, so this is the only way that we could come up with to get it perfectly correct.

Forgot to take pictures of the completed part, but it all fits nicely together now.

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