Right Wingtip Finished

In anticipation of sanding and cutting fiberglass today and in the near future (Finish Kit), I decided to give in and get a bandsaw as well as a belt sander. This triggered quite an odyssey as my favorite store, Harbor Freight didn't have a band saw I would have liked. I got the belt and disc sander there though and then went to Home Depot to look for a Ryobi bandsaw, the one I've seen Dave in Ohio using. That was successful as far as it concerned the saw but they were out of fine bandsaw blades (!^%$@#) so on my way home I passed Lowe's and picked up a Bosch 18TPI saw blade. I also finally bought an electric screwdriver to drive recently purchased hex deburring bit. It is kind of silly to manually deburr the tailcone and both wings and then get the motor driven version when there's not that much left but I have a feeling I might become a repeat offender and then I'll have it in the shop.



I put both machines right to work after finishing the wingtip skin. I still had to match drill and deburr the 6 holes on the trailing edge of the little triangular skin closeout. And, yes, I put the deburring driver to work as well. It's really nice on my wrist!. Forgot to take a photo of the tool though.


Finally done with Section 17, the right wing is done! Exactly 90 hours spent on Section 17, this sums up to 176.5 hours to finish both wings - short of the flaperons. Current Hobbs meter on the build shows around 370 hours.

I used the bandsaw to cut close to the scribe line of the nav light fairing. NICE! The fine blade went through it like a hot knife through butter and I could very easily and precisely control the cut. I love this saw! Then I used the belt sander as much as possible to sand to the scribe line and the rest was done by hand. The inner cut could get done by anything else but the angle grinder again as there just wasn't enough clearance for anything else. But that was done within a few minutes and I just ignored the dust or stood windward of the little wind we had. The fairing was quickly sanded to shape and I could drill the rivet holes and prepare the epoxy to fill the wingtip rib side.


I was a little better this time about the amount if epoxy I put in there but still I had to grind a little bit out to allow for the upper nut to have enough room. I also trimmed back some excess epoxy that had been squished towards the inside of the fairing where it wouldn't have any structural function anyway. I cleaned off the car wax I had used on the wing, crimped the Molex connectors on the wires, hooked up the light with a battery and tested all the wiring in the right wing by firing those lights of.
Great show as it was dusk already!
Then I clecoed the fairing back on to be ready to run the masking tape around the outline of it tomorrow and join the Pro-Seal club.