Chapter 14 - Rick's airplane

Chapter 14

Spar Construction including Mounting of Spar and Wings.


	Rear web facing on spar. The spar jig can be seen in the rear. My spar is 4 inches longer. I added length at the center of the plans spar.		One cannot have too many clamps. This spar is built as per plans except for the added length and additional strength for retractable landing gear.


	Seat Belt hardpoints made as per plans.		Looks like a nice place for speakers. These are actually access ports for wingbolts and cables to antennae and marker lights.


	The face of this spar has 11 ??? layers of BID to create a mounting plate for the Infinity retractable landing gear. Port on bottom is for wingbolt access.		Ready to go sparring.


	Randy Dixon, Scott Irwin, and I discuss how to move the fuselage to get it to a new level platform prior to spar and wing installation.		Fuselage laser center line matches up with spar center line. Level and ready for floxing.


	Water level system for wings showed tee-ed up and taped to the floor. Works well and is highly accurate for leveling wings.		Water level system shown at the wing root. The camera is not quite level in this picture but it reads level front to back and both sides.


	It's winter and very cold outside yet several of these butterflies completed their metamorphosis and were ready to take flight in my heated hangar while I'm building my own kind of spar and wings. Me, I gotta wait till I can fly...		Wings and spar are successfully on, straight and level, in all directions. My son Scott and his fianc'ee Deena helped me get it right.

	What I learned: Never use the foam that sands easily and leaves particles that feel like sugar on your clothing. It doesn't leave a strong enough structure beneath the fiberglass. I've always hated using it. In this case I used it to fill the gap behind the spar and between the spar and the stainless steel firewall. I will never use it again. I only use it on this part because it is not structural. It only fills the gap. I used it on the nose but the fiberglass over it is thicker and stronger. Also it is stronger on the inside of the nose. The two part urethane foam would be better, peanut butter could even be better. (psych) Methods to my Madness: I didn't have the landing gear. I'm doing retracts so I leveled and mounted the fuselage to sawhorses and bondoed in place. I also bondoed the saw horses to the floor. We then put the wings and spar on tall saw horses and used a pulley system to help seat the spar into the fuselage. Once it was there I removed the pulley system and began leveling the wings and spar. We used large foam wedges to work the wings level, when we were finally satisfied we bondoed foam in place. I used the wing level point that is placed on the wing as the wings are test leveled and mounted to the spar. I also built my own large water level which consists of 3/8" tubing tee-ed together, (larger tubing clears of bubbles in the system better than smaller tubing), taped to the floor, and mounted on stands. It has been made to test level at six different points. Two places equal distant from the wing tips, and two points on each wing root. This level is the most perfect way to level. It's like having a large body of water under the plane and being able to get exact measurements from a perfectly level surface. Leveling the wings, front to back, and also full width (tip to tip) as well as measuring from the wing tip to the nose is a process that requires patience, a few hours of checking and rechecking is what it takes becuase changing one point affects the others. There was three of us and we would work all levels and measurements until we all agreed that every measurement was as good as it possibly could be. The spar is centered, the wings are level with an equal dihedral on both sides, also the distance from nosetip to inside wingtip are the same. I bondoed it all together then let it sit for a day then rechecked all measurements. After being satisfied I then floxed the spar into the fuselage. I then applied all glass layups slightly better than plans to compensate for larger wing span.