While waiting for clecos to arrive I had a look at the wings, starting with the spars. The spar is made up of a .125″ center web with .032″ sheet on either side. One of the sheets is the main spar which is about 12 feet (3.6 m) long and the other sheet is called the aft web. On one side of the sandwich is a 0.090″ doubler. The spar caps go above and below the sandwich.
The story from James is the first builder wanted to put flush rivets through the wing skins into the spar caps. This requires countersinking into the spar caps, which removes some material. Sonex didn’t like that and James bought new spar caps, and had to do some disassembly.
I had 3 main spars, 3 center webs, 2 aft spars, and 2 doublers. I also had some angle hardware including one wing attach block. This had already been drilled to 1/4″ and drilled to fit the spar. However the holes did not line up at all. As I was making up a bunch of angle hardware anyway, I decided to redo it. I also had to make my first order from Spruce for metal and bolts.
Because there were more components than necessary and some had already been dimpled I had to figure out how to get usable assemblies. Because disassembly had been done there may also have been some destroyed parts.
I think I will be able to salvage this assembly without buying anything, but I am waiting on Sonex for an opinion.
The wing ribs looked mostly OK, except for one outer forward rib that was cut into. There were also some mis-rivets on the root rib and some missing parts. Last, the root rib attach angles were not trimmed up and down. I could do this later during a dry fit, to butt up nicely against the spar caps.
Needing more clecos, I made an order from Aircraft Tool Supply who are very well set-up to cater to Canadian customers! I also got some necessary tools like a microstop countersink for WAY less than Spruce sells it for, and some drill bits.
I stopped by St-Lambert airport and met a guy with a Rotax 912-powered ultralight trike and a Rotax 914-powered Kitfox. St-Lambert airport is a private grass strip with very low rent and a good community of ultralight and amateur-built pilots. It’s a little further than St-Jean-Chrysostome, and isn’t maintained in winter, but seems like a great place to meet people.
