With the wing panels approved for cover it's time to make all the struts and fittings to hold them in place. First up is the Center Section Struts. All the struts are made like the landing gear struts. They are laminated from 4 layers of 1/4" fir. Good quality glue joints depend on even pressure which means lots of clamps. You also need to have everything ready and work fast to brush glue on to all the laminations before it starts curing.
The struts were cut from the laminated blanks with the bandsaw. The rounded and streamlines cross sections were formed with planes, rasps and sand paper.
With the return of warmer weather the operations moved to the horse barn.
Sister Diane is doing duty as a clamp to hold the wing strut while Dad (Ernie) planes it to shape.
It looks like Debbie's horse has been evicted from the barn, the stalls are gone. It also looks like Wally's band saw has been borrowed again. The washing machine pulleys for slowing it down to cut steel are hanging on the wall. Dennis still uses them to slow down his band saw for metal cutting.
Some of the metal fittings for the wings hanging on a wire for the paint to dry.
To attach the wires, which hold the Center Section from moving side to side, there is a bracket added to the top of the firewall. It's braced to the engine mount corner angles on the inside of the fuselage.
On the engine side it's braces to the engine mount with 2 tubes.
The forward Cabane Strut fittings attach to brackets which have a bolt sticking out through the side of the fuselage.
The rear of the Cabane Struts attach to the fuselage with fittings in the Monoplane landing wire attachments. Just like on the Monoplane these fitting are held together with the large turnbuckle which pulls the Monoplane rigging tight when unfolding the wings.
The Center Section is mounted to the struts and the brace wires rigged.
Fly Baby is growing new wings.
The next step is to mount the 4 wing panels.
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