Title: set angle of incidence
I'm logging 10 hours for this due to how much time I spent measuring, researching, drinking coffee while staring at plumb bobs, etc. Honestly, drilling the holes only took about 10 minutes once I worked up the gumption to do it. The general consensus seems to be that the two most high stakes operations in the whole project are cutting the canopy and setting the angle of incidence. There's lots of ways for this to go horribly, horribly wrong, so I was in no big hurry. Leveled the fuselage in both directions via digital level. it showed zero deviation laterally when measured across the spars. For lateral measurement I checked 4 places; both longerons and both canopy tracks right above them. 3 of the 4 measurements showed 0.0 degrees and one was 0.1 degrees tail low. Good enough. When we installed these wings, I hung plumb bobs and the looked really straight, but I realized that the inner ones were at probably about 30% span which probably wasn't good, so I elected them all to get a wider span. Don't know if it was as a result of that or all the tweaking for the incidence adjustment, but they ended up swept forward about 1/4" from root to tip. The limiting factor is the forward finger of the aft fuselage attach hitting the inboard rib flange on the wing. I could get rid of it by pulling the wings and trimming probably 1/16" or so off both sides, which would let the spar stub that's coming out of the wings nest more fully against the fuselage and bring the tips aft. I thought about that for probably a millisecond and decided that I wasn't going through that ordeal for 1/4" sweep. Vans says the tolerance is 1/2" +/- . I'm well within that, and symmetrical to within 1/32" or so when triangulating from multiple points both fore and aft. An obvious goal in all of this is for the plane to fly hands off straight and level and to stall straight ahead without adding a bunch of aerodynamic band-aides. It's currently as symmetrical as I'm capable of making it in my garage and I'm not going to mess up a good thing by chasing a 1/4" sweep. Careful measuring at the aft attach points showed that I had good edge distance all the way around if I was precise about it, and I certainly intended to be. Took a break, had another coffee, and then remeasured everything once again. Checked incidence in multiple places, then recalibrated the level, flipped it end for end and did it all again. The trouble with a digital level is the same problem you get with any digital instrument; They are almost too precise. I remember after glass cockpits and digital engine readouts became a thing we would get squawks on new airplane deliveries that tit or percent thrust or whatever was showing a 0.5% split at parallel throttle level position and could we fix that. When gauges were analog, nobody could measure to that level of accuracy and everything was fine, but now we drive ourselves crazy chasing 0.1 percent, or degree or whatever. It's sort of the same thing here. I have a harbor freight digital level, and I just bought an expensive one specifically for this operation the other day. Both of them say there tolerance is +/- 0.1 degree, Both levels tend to agree, so my mistrust of harbor freight quality seems to have been misplaced in this instance. But, it's easy to get down in the weeds chasing that last 0.1* Multiple measurements from multiple positions taken multiple times finally had me convinced that I was as perfect in incidence as I could get. Incidence delta with respect to fuselage level varied from 0.0* to 0.1* depending where on the span the measurement was recorded, with 2 digital levels. GOOD ENOUGH! Measured and eyeballed the location for the uber critical aft spar hole. The most critical part of the whole operation isn't really leveling the wing, it's where you drill this hole after all the leveling is done. It's paramount that 5/8" edge distance is maintained from the center of this hole to all edges of all the material that it's going through. In my case, that left me a window of about 1/4" square to locate this. There are horror stories of guys missing this measurement and having to r&r aft spars or fuselage carry throughs due to the vans response "we have no engineering data to support any edge distance smaller than 5/8" If that happens, it's literally months of extra work just to get back to teh same place you were 30 seconds ago before you mis-drilled that hole. It's also worth considering that this is a -5 bolt going through a thick stickup, so if you get the hole crooked, the bolt won't set flat i.e. you're also screwed. With all that in mind, plus the fact that drilling these holes sets sweep and incidence forever, you can see how they sort of give one pause before picking up a weapon of mass construction (drill). A while back I had obtained a set of drill blocks that somebody on VAF had machined specifically for this operation. Basically a chance of aluminum about the size and shape of a zippo lighter with a hole that will accept different size bushings. So, once I was sure I was ready to drill the holes, I machine punched the location and started a hole just a few thousandths deep with a #40. Then I located the drill guide with a bit centered on this hole, clamped it down and drilled a #40 pilot hole. inserted a cleco in the hole, confirmed via careful measuring, mirrors, etc. that I had good edge distance all the way around, rechecked that triangulation and incidence hadn't shifted. Re clamped drill bushing and upsized to a 9/32" drill bit. Finished off with a .3105 reamer. Followed the same process on the other side. Note- a AN5 bolt has a nominal diameter of 0.3125", but these both seemed kind of loose for a hole that was reamed underside, so I checked them and they both miked out at .310" i.e. they are on the low end of the tolerance for AN bolts. I know that they are acceptable per mil-spec, but given the critical nature of this attachment, I may try to find some bolts that will allow a tighter fit at final wing installation. Anyway, I'm super glad that operation is over. Only a little faring work, plumbing, and rigging and then these wings can come off and go to the hangar!


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