I was busy with work most of last year, but did manage to work a few weekends.
So things have been happening, I just haven't been doing so well at updating this blog.
The wings were a long job of deburring, all those ribs, and they were pretty rough as delivered, took many weekends with a file, the scotch brite wheel and pretty much every deburring tool I have.
After that was done however, the wing assembly was very quick.
I built a wing rack to hold the wings. This helps during assembly, but is also very useful for storage of the wings while the rest of the aircraft is assembled.
The landing light is installed in the wing, as well as the stall warning vane, and the wiring for the position and strobe lights.
Vans has updated the kit with a new avionics package "skyview" and has also introduced some other modifications such as better wing electrical connectors, so, in anticipation of updating my kit, I have not assembled the old style connections, and I have left the wing top skins un-riveted for now so I can easily add these updates when they eventually get to me (in the final kit I expect).
I also have left the flaperons for now because the fuselage kit arrived and I got busy working on that :)
I'll go back and do the flaperons when I finish the wings with the new electrical connectors etc.
The fuselage kit is going well, and I took a slightly different approach this time.
I preassembled everything with clecos to see how it all went together, without removing the blue covering or really any of the assembly operations.
That really helps get a grip on the whole kit and when you go back and do the steps for real it all makes much more sense and goes much smoother.
So, just as I was in the middle of the first real assembly, I broke my hand squeezer !, well not broke as such, but the dimple die I was using got itself stuck in the pin and will not come out. this means I can't change dies.
not sure what I'm going to do about that, so for now I decided to do all the other steps first.
So, since I got so good at deburring during the wings, I went ahead and deburred pretty much every part for the fuselage kit in no time at all, (2 or 3 days)
what I have now is a big pile of deburred and primed and ready to assemble fuselage parts.
I think the actual assembly at this point will now be very quick.
This will get me up to the forming of the longerons (a big job with some skill required)
and then the finializing of the fuselage kit should also be pretty quick.
photos of the progress so far:
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