Wing Jig

I'm going a little nuts not being able to work on the plane.  I was going to wait and build the wing jig after I was done riveting the ribs to the spars just to keep the workspace from being too crowded, but I needed a garage break today so went ahead and started it.  I bought enough wood to build the jig from scratch, but I still had the end pieces off the wing stand I tore down and figured I might as well salvage what I could from them.  The wing jig isn't really a "jig" in that it doesn't have to keep things perfectly aligned or anything.  It's  really just a way to hang them while assembling.  Because of that, I went for utility over perfection.  I started by ripping the extra bits off of the end pieces of the old wing stand.

Once all of the scrap pieces were off, I was left with just a 3ish foot base and a vertical 2x4 stabilized with a piece of plywood.  The vertical 2x4 wasn't tall enough on its own, so I just married another 2x4 to it and braced everything.  The jig needs to be about 133" from end to end.  Because I'm me, and I'll break this jig down and reuse the wood once I'm done with it, I decided to just screw two 8' 2x4s to each end.  Once I am ready to mount the wings, I'll slide these 2x4s together to come up with the right length.  Everything seems pretty solid at this point.  It's possible that I'll need to fasten the bases to the concrete with bolts or adhesive, but once I get the wings in place, I kind of doubt it's going to move much.

One thing I haven't done yet is attached the brackets that the spars will rest on.  I bought a section of steel angle (the stuff with holes drilled in it) that I'll cut up to make the horizontal shelf and supporting angled brackets.  I'm not going to do that until I get the whole thing in place though.  The garage floor has a pretty good slope to it, so I need to see where things ultimately end up so I can put the brackets at the correct height to keep everything somewhat level.