When the wings are done they have to come off because they are in the way of installing the doors. Also they have to come off so that fuel line and sender line holes can be drilled in the fuselage (and the lines put through). So today we had a small crew assembled to help put the wings back on their stands.
Previously, however, my brother in law had been able to get the “wing stands” delivered to the hangar. Now as you can see from this picture these are more accurately “plane stands”!! I think these stands can lift up some pretty heavy duty aircraft – the wing of a STOL 750 is nothing to these beasts.
Using the stands, getting the right height for the wings was a breeze, and they freed up the ladders for easy inspection. We did have one problem though – we couldn’t get the wings straight because the wing root was too tight to the fuselage. After a lot of head scratching we realised that we had installed the attach bracket on the wing the wrong side of the attach point on the fuselage. In this picture you can see the fuselage attachment point in front of the wing attach point
We had originally put this behind. Why, you ask? Because that is how it is in the video, they even show back drilling the hole in the blind. I don’t know if this just a mistake on the video, or perhaps with edition 3 of the kit, this changed but putting this bracket in front made all the difference in the world.
A final height check
and the bolt holes for the two attach points was drilled to final size.
Then the wings were removed and put back in the wing stand. Next up will be back to the doors or possibly the elevator controls.