Total build time: 325 hours.
To begin the right wing substructure, I first attached the aft ribs with their spacers, then added the forward ribs. I then put the assembly on sawhorses, and clecoed the aft spar in place:
The root ribs are special, and the aft root rib in particular needs to be precise in order to help make the whole substructure be square an aligned. I spent a lot of time tweaking the position of the root rib (prior to any drilling) to make it flush and square with the rest of the wing. I placed piano hinge through the tooling holes in the normal ribs to help indicate proper alignment.
Note to other builders: the aft root rib doesn’t need to be cut quite as short on the aft end as the plans suggest (there is room to spare if you cut it a bit long)… cutting it too precisely may result in what I encountered. After drilling out the holes in the aft root rib angle, i found that a couple of holes were too close to the edge of the angle:
My solution to this was to drill one additional hole, then add a reinforcement of 1/8″ and use ccp-46 rivets to tie it together in final assembly:
With the aft root rib now having a satisfactory installation, I turned my attention to the forward root rib. The aft root rib had the benefit of the rear spar to help with alignment… for the forward root rib I used light and tooling holes to zero in on proper alignment:
With the position of the root ribs now locked, I completed their attachment to the forward and aft main spar angles (I unbolted the angles to complete riveting.) I did not rivet the aft root rib to the aft spar angle at this time.
