Ribs glued and upper tip diagonals installed
Friday night we finished up the details needed to glue up the new ribs. It was a little challenging to get them clamped up. I like using small brass nails to tack the ribs to the spars, but wasn't sure I wanted to drive nails through the edge of the plywood ribs. We got the clamps figured out and everything stayed put.
Today, we pulled all the clamps off the rib glue-up and everything looked good. I missed gluing the front of one rib, but that was fixed while gluing the diagonals. I trimmed the spars flush with the tip ribs, which makes it look much better now.
The job for tonight was to install the spruce diagonals for each wing tip on the upper wing. The last two rib bays aren't supported by drag wires, so a wood diagonal is used instead. This is a routine task and our only deviation from the original setup was to add gussets around the end of the diagonals for more surface area for the epoxy. We used a laser to make sure we had the rear spar straight. Otherwise, the aileron hinge setup could get pretty interesting. After the diagonals were correctly fit, we made the gussets out of the same material. Once we were satisfied with the setup, I epoxied it all together. Dad figured out the clamps while I made a mess with the epoxy. The tips stiffened up nicely before the epoxy was even cured.
The next step should be locating and setting up the aileron hinges. Once we're past that hurdle, the ailerons can be built.
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