All about ribs

Today we spent the whole day working and made quite a bit of progress. 

First, we finished gluing the ribs and the corner edges through the ribs by shaving the inside of specific ribs .

A & B ribs shaved to fit the drag spar

After that, we riveted the few parts still being held by clecos and finally we covered the glued ribs with the aluminum tape.

Drag Spar in place

Close up of the taping 

Wing end corners

Another view of a corner 

The process is not hard but it is quite time consuming. 

To get a wing done we used three rolls of the fiberglass lined adhesive tape and almost two of the aluminum tape. This means i'll be short 2 rolls of the fiberglass and one of the Aluminum.. I've looked for it everywhere with no luck, so, I guess I'll have to get it imported from the US...

*Luckily some friends are coming to visit us for turkey day.. hopefully they'll bring me some.

finished with one wing and waiting for parts to do the next

Finished wing edge

Compresion tube suport 

Compression tube and aileron control mechanism

Completed wing

Gluing the ribs

Continuing with the wing assembly, yesterday we began the process of setting the foam ribs in place.

As described by the kit instructions, we start by applying a thin layer of Gorilla glue (previously mixed with water) on each end. Then, after setting them in place we wrapped them around with fiber glass tape. Gorilla glue expands quite a bit, so it is key to place *and tape* one rib at a time, otherwise you run the risk that the expanding glue will shift things around. The roaster jig that mike suggested we built for the wing, helped a lot in the rib setting process.

After the first set of ribs was in place, we decided to place the the drag strut diagonally through the rib holes.  We carefully shaved the rib's holes on the inside, just enough to allow the drug strut to fit in place with out bending any of the ribs.

By the end of the day , we finished the first section with pretty good results. All in all , the process is not difficult, it just takes a little patience to get the ribs placed right.

First section glued and tape wrapped

To be honest, the hardest part was to handle the amount of on lookers that kept dropping by, to chat and check things out !

See you next week!