Right wing: lights and lens, wing tip and wing stand

TLDR

• Built wing stand
• Installed light lens on the right wing
• Installed right wing tip and nav lights

Wing stand

Last weekend I spent an afternoon to build the EAA wing stand following this instruction.

Still mising the strap, will install next week

Landing light lens

For the most part of last week, I battled with the landing light lens installation.

The lens has 2 pieces, a pixie glass and an aluminum reenforcement strip which is pre-drilled. The pre-drilled holes on the strip literally do not match the wing’s leading edge holes.

I first followed the build instruction and tried to match them and use self tapping screws. But since the holes do not match at all, I had to drill a lot, and made most holes larger. So the self tapping screws were out of the question. Also, I didn’t feel comfortable using those. They didn’t look very secure.

So change of plan, I decided to enlarge all the holes and fit them with M3 rivnuts instead. And because the wing skin is dimpled, I bought some countersink M3 screws to match the dimple. In the end this came out very nice.

The process goes like this: I cleco-ed the lens and strip onto the wing, match drilled 2 holes at a time, then took them off and enlarge the holes and install rivnut.

Once I finished the bottom line, I drilled 2 new holes and used countersink rivets to hold the glass and reenforcement strip together. Then did the same thing for the 2 sides, then the top side.

After about 5-6 hours, I got all the holes drilled and rivnuts installed. I was able to install screws to every hole in the end, but some holes were not perfectly aligned. Even so, I think it came out better than just using the stock self tapping screws.

Work in progress

Work in progress

Finished, back side

Nav light

I also installed nav light to the wing tip.

In order to do that, I need to cut a hole on the wing tip for the wire to go through, also dril 3 rivet holes for the light’s back plate.

I used a cardboard to trace the general shape of the light, and marked the hole’s position on the card board.

Card board to trace nav light’s shape and hole position

Then, I put the cardboard on the wing tip and drilled the holes following the template, and riveted the backing plate onto the wing tip.

Back plate is on

Test fitting the light

Then I switched to work on installing wing tip before connecting the wiring. There are 4 wires to be connected to the wing harness:

PIN	Color
Ground	Black
Nav	Red
Strobe	Yellow
Sync	Green

Tied long wires into a loop

Wing tip

Outboard Rib 14

I removed the wing stand on the outboard side, and installed the last rib.

Installed Rib 14 and fed the wire through

Fitting the composite wing tip

The composotie wing tip is supposed to fit within the wing skin and touch top and bottom. It is a little too flat, so I cut a yoga foam and inserted it into the tip to hold its shape. This helped the tip to fully fit inside the wing skin during fitting.

Good bye yoga block

The build instruction also called to fully butt the wing tip to the rib. Once the tip is inserted it’s difficult to see if it’s fully butted, and not overlapping. So I put a blue tape around the skin, and cut it to exactly the width I need to insert on the wing tip. Then I transferred the tape to the wing tip. By doing this, I can tell the tip is in the exact position when the tape is fully covered by the skin.

Tape around the skin

Transfered to the wing tip

Fitted to the wing

Fitted to the wing

At the rear end, the tip is on top of rib so the holes to match drill are covered. I used a hole finder to location them and it worked perfectly.

Hole finder and the holes it found

Using washer as doubler

About half of the holes on the wing tip was countersunk to match the dimples on the wing skin. The skin is pretty thin in those areas. So I decided to use washer behind those holes as a doubler. I placed the washers and clecoed them in place, then carefully smeared Loctite 9460 around them and made sure the glue did not touch the cleco. I think JB Weld would have worked, I just had some leftover loctite so that’s what I used.

Adding washers as doubler

Riveting and wiring

Then the rest was easy. I put the tip back onto the wing, connected the wires from the nav light, and riveted everything together.

Final result

Hanging flap and aileron

With wing tip in place, I was finally able to hang the flag and aileron on the wing. I have not shot the final row of rivets yet. I wll leave it to tomorrow.

Flap and aileron on the wing, with a string to ensure straight