Adam Dickson

Second (post-build) test skinning of RH wing

A brief account here. With the following provisos, I was able to achieve a near-perfect fit of the right hand skins. The only general exception was at the extreme outboard end (between ribs 10 and the tip) where possibly some upsizing may be required to match the front spar, or perhaps some elongation tolerated.

Perfect flange matching achieve everywhere, except that to achieve this the main spar connector angle rivets had to be left unoccupied for ribs 3 and 8 and mismatch permitted. In both cases the mismatch was 0.8mm or less, probably permitting resolution by recentering and upsizing to 4.8mm. The cause of this appears to be a tolerance on the spar connector angles. Will check with TAF on this.

Initial test skinning of the left hand wing shows similar issues for rib 3, but not rib 8.

I can easily enforce a match-up between the rib and these connector angles, but then the rib is shifted forward or back slightly. In each case there is a resultant mismatch of 0.5mm or so between the rib flanges and the skins. I have found no reasonable application of force can remove this error, so I am localising and dealing with the true cause.

There is also a slight skin match issue with rib 4, being forward of the proper position by about 0.5mm. I attribute this to my decision to remanufacture the rear spar connector angles. I assumed the rib tail flanges were correct and re-made these angles to match them, absorbing about 0.5-1mm of gap. This assumption was wrong and will evaluate adjusting the tail flange and using the original angles. The left hand rib 4 has the same issue.

This post is from Adam Dickson