I had to start tonight with a little shop reorganization. I think I can actually squeeze the wing jig into my shop bay as opposed to putting it where the car goes. I moved the drill press and bandsaw closer to the table saw (it's very cozy now, but those won't get used much during the wing construction), then moved the table with the grinder and sander back a few feet. Pivoting my big work bench 90 degrees gave me a pretty decent size area that should be enough room to build each wing in the jig. That will at least get keep the car inside through the winter.
The manual calls out priming and riveting the rear spar before moving to ribs, but I'm just going to cleco everything together first then prime all at once. It's just far easier that way, especially now that I have to set up to prime inside. First things first, I sorted out all of the ribs I'd need for each wing. Each wing gets a variety of left and right facing rib flanges, so you really have to pay attention to the plans when figuring out what goes where.
This is where I was reminded that all of those individual parts I've been working on for a while actually go together to make a plane! Putting the ribs on the front spar really changed how things look!
Once the ribs were clecoed onto the front spar, I put the rear spar in place. The plans are a little weak when it comes to seeing how the rear spar and ribs connect. For most ribs, there is only one place for them to go, but for some, there are multiple hole patterns where they could go if you're not paying attention. The exploded view of the wing doesn't show it in enough detail to figure out, so I had to use the rivet callouts to see which 3 hole pattern in the doublers were for the ribs and which were just the same pattern but for other brackets. It was pretty easy to double check just by ensuring the ribs were parallel to each other at least.
Most of the ribs are evenly spaced, but the inboard end has double the ribs for the wing walk area.
The next step will be to match drill everything, disassemble and prime, then rivet it all together and build the wing jig to hang it on in preparation for skins and the front nose ribs.
