Today was wing mating's day to end with the dreaded rear spar drilling.
First we have to get the plane in the garden and level it in all dimension. My neighbour Raymond is my helper.



We use shims and play with the tires pressure to get the fuselage straight.



Then we get the first wing. The spar and the bolts get greased.



Then the forward spar is inserted in it's slot. Some learning was needed to get the right way to do this. What worked for us was the following, insert the spar as far as possible, then wiggle the wing tip to align the holes and insert an upper bolt. Wiggle some more to insert a lower bolt. For the rear spar, it just gets inserted in the fork, fine tuning will be done later.
On the picture I use a small mirror to verify if the holes are aligned before inserting a bolt.



The is one of the fuel tank brackets, a small bend is needed to get it snug with the bracket on the tank.



Here a view of the four installed bolts, two big and two small bolts. The lower bolts are not completely inserted as the landing gear welding is interfering in front of the longeron. My bolts are a bit to long, I'll shorten them for the other wing.



This picture shows the rear spar, it's not completely snug because one part of the fork is hitting the innermost wing rib. This will be taken into account for the final fitting.



After the second wind is installed, begins the long process of tweaking everything. First the wings have to be perpendicular to the fuselage. For this we took three measurments : from the wing tip to a central point in the rear fuselage, the alignement of four plumb bobs hanging from the leading edge, and the alignement of a rivet line on the wings and the fuse. The two latter showed that the wings were slightly swept forward ay about 3/16" at the tip.



We file away 1/32 of the rear spar and of the forward part of the fork (the rear part does not interfere with the wing). The sweep is now zero, so we go on to incidence measuring.
Incidence is adjusted by moving the rear spar up and down in the fork. We first check that the fuselage is still straight, then using the block shown in the plans, we check that the level is horizontal. The measurment is done at a few points along the wing span. Both wings are now at the same incidence and the edge distances for the rear spar drilling look good.



Then the drilling block is clamped in place (with some difficulties, it's quite cramped) and a small hole drilled.



This is the exit hole of the right wing , it looks good leaving enough edge distance.



This is the exit hole on the left side. The center of the hole is in the square, but as I file a bit of the fork on the right there might not be enough edge distance if I leave the hole as is. The day having been quite long, we decide to take new measurements tomorrow.
If the edge distance proves to small, the solution will be to drag the hole slightly to the left during the drilling to final size which is two and a half time the present size.



We have a plane. Almost!!



And some happy builders. but let's not forget the photographer, Sabine who gave a hand whenever possible.