Dennis: As I recall the spars took several months to arrive. While we waited we built ribs. The plans suggest stacking the plywood and sawing several parts at once. It might work if you can get the blade tight enough and go slow enough. It doesn't take much flexing of the blade to make parts which are quite different from each other. I would rather cut out the ribs with a router and template. The other thing which was a bit of a pain was trying to nail on the cap strips to the plywood webs. The strips have a groove cut in them the full length to fit down over the web. When you nail through the strip it easily splits. I'd do it with some "0" shaped strips of plywood and wedges to clamp the strips tight to the webs.
Everything needs to be drawn out on the spars before you start assembly and all holes drilled. It quickly starts looking like a wing. It really is much like building a model.
The compression struts, drag and anti-drag wires need to be in and the wing trammeled before to much is done to hold everything square. For me the wings are always the most fun. These are great to build.
The wing tip bows are made from strips of redwood 1/8" thick and about 2" wide. The first strip gets glued and nailed in place then the others get glued and clamped to it just like building the tail surface trailing edges only bigger and heavier, much bigger. It also takes a lot of clamps. Everything needs to be staged and that first strip needs to be well attached.
We let the wing tip set until everything else was done on the structure. There is a lot of wood to remove and we wanted to be sure nothing came apart.
The support for the aileron push rod keeps the push rod from doing damage in the wing when the wings are folded. It's easier to instal before the wing walk is installed.
The wing walk is probably the most tedious part of the wing. It's just tight to get in and nail all the corner blocks
Aileron opening.
Shaping the wing tip bow is probably easiest done with a draw knife. Once the carving is done the tip needs to be sanded smooth. Rough carving will show through the fabric, I've seen some that were crudely carved..
So cool to have built a wing.
The aileron is basically built like the tail surfaces. The spar is a box beam and the ribs are plywood with 1/4" square sticks. The curved portion of the trailing edge is part of the wing tip bow. The straight portion of the trailing edge and on the wing is a piece of aluminum trailing edge.
I changed my mind. The most tedious task is varnishing all the wood, 2 coats. One thing for sure i would do differently is to use Epoxy Varnish. Spar Varnish can not be used where the dope will attack it through the fabric. Those areas need to be varnished. Moisture gets under the fabric and rot starts.
Once the varnish dries the ribs are stiffened by criss crossing twill tapes between the ribs.
The aileron is hinged with sections of piano hinge bolted on.
Drilling the holes for the brace wire fittings after the wing was done was way to hard. If I were doing it again I would pre-drill the holes in the blocks and then transfer the holes to the fittings.
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