I ordered the empennage kit from Van's a few months ago, but manufacturing is pretty slow these days, so it's not expected to arrive until mid-August sometime. Luckily, around the same time I stumbled on a wing kit for sale on Vansairforce (fantastic RV builder forum). The downside - it was in Reno. I played the "I'm your favorite son" card, and before you knew it, I was on a road trip with Mom and Dad. We had to haul a horse trailer home anyway, so I rationalized a detour through Reno on the way back to Seattle and we picked up the wing kit. That spar crate is long! It stuck a few feet out of the back of the trailer, but we had it strapped in pretty solid, so it didn't budge.
The spar and wing crates are just going to hang out for a while. Even though I have the wings in-hand, I'm not going to build out of order. I've been told over and over by RV builders that starting with the tail is the way to go. For one, Van's purposefully writes better instructions for the tail since it's supposed to be the first kit built. By the time you get to the wings, the hand holding in the manual apparently stops, since the assumption is that you know how to read plans at that point. Plus, the tail kit parts are far cheaper than the wing kit parts. I'd much rather screw up a cheap part as I learn! I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who built an RV without having to reorder a few parts. I'm just assuming I'll also be in that camp, no matter how careful I am.
And this brings me to today! Since I have a few months before my tail kit arrives, I decided to go ahead and do some of the prep work on the wing ribs while I'm waiting. I'm not going to build anything, but the rib prep is a huge task, so I may as well get it out of the way. This doesn't look like many ribs, but each one in the picture is actually 2 sandwiched together. This is not all of the wing ribs unfortunately. There are still more in the crate.
And so begins the mindless task of deburring every single edge on each rib. Every edge that has been punched, cut, sheared, etc needs to be smoothed out to reduce the risk of stress cracks down the road. I am finding that the different edges require different methods for deburring, so I'm doing them all in stages. I first smoothed out all of the lightening holes using a 1" Scotch Brite wheel on my die grinder as recommended by the instructions. This worked really well. I can't imagine how slow it would go using any other method. I did hit both sides, just because the burr causes a lip, so just doing the flat inner surface of the hole doesn't necessarily do the trick. It didn't take long before the wheel had a couple of grooves in it. Actually, that ended up being great because it made it super easy to whip it around the circle and deburr without losing control of the grinder. One circle and it's done. Do much more than that and you're actually taking material off instead of just smoothing the surface.
And here's the pile of ribs with lightening holes deburred. Step 2 will be to deburr the flanges. This is complicated by the fact that Van's already partially fluted many of these (they still have to be fluted to straighten unfortunately). If it were just a flat flange, I'd run it over the large Scotch Brite wheel and it would be done super fast. With the flutes, the wheel doesn't work very well. So I'm having to use fine grit (I think 400) sand paper to hit the flanges. This is what is going to take forever.
I will try to finish up the flanges this weekend if I can. The last step in prepping these ribs will be to take one more pass to deburr all of the notches. I could have done that while doing the flanges, but there are a number of notches in each rib and they're pretty small. I need to make some sort of small rod with sand paper on it to get into the small notches. Just easier to do them all at once as opposed to switching between tools. So that's on deck.
Once each rib is completely deburred I'll mark it with blue tape or something. It's going to be a while until I actually start building the wing, so I need to be pretty clear about what has been done.
