 I first tried covering the ribs on the right half of the wing with wood. I used thin plywood that was easy to bend. I joined it the way you would join aluminum. |
 I found that wood was OK, but did not really want to contour well. The constantly changing size and shape of the wing left some sharp curves. |
 On the left side I tried using foam like I did on the fuselage plug. |
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 Here I am shaping the foam using a long piece of an aluminum door frame attached to my sander. It worked well. A step up from doing it by hand. |
 I messed up and used vinylester resin on the foam. It left a lot of melted areas. I filled these areas with drywall mud to fix the mess. It actually made for a nice finish. |
 If you look at the right wing, (the left side of the picture,) you will see the wood has been removed. |
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 Little blocks of wood are now below the rim of the rib. I use these blocks to attach the foam to the rib. The blocks are attached to the rib using hot glue which is also used to attach the foam to the blocks. |
 Using this "new" method allowed me to use a thinner sheet of foam that could be bent to form the shape of the rib. This required a lot less sanding. I adapted this method from a technique given to me by Steve Rahm, the developer of the Vision. |
 To mate the wing parts at the bend I simply draped fiberglass strips across the gap and applied resin to the area touching the respective wing parts. When the resin set up, I wet out the rest of the fiberglass and allowed it to harden. I then filled the area with drywall mud and shaped it with sandpaper. A layer of fiberglass was then applied to cover the mud. |
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 This view shows how nice the curve turned out. Now I had to figure out how to fill the leading edge gap and maintain the proper airfoil shape. More sleepless nights! |
 Another mid night brainstorm! I cut leading edge profiles from five pieces of 2" thick foam. Then I glued them together. |
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 I then cut a series of thin cuts on the bottom side and thicker cuts on the top side. This allowed an accordion like effect. I bent this accordion and glued it in place with hot glue. |
 A thin layer of good 'ol drywall mud finished it off nicely. |
 A box was built from foam to replicate the oil cooler inlets. |
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 This shows the contouring of the inlet. |
 Here I have the wing center section propped up. This is approximately the angle and height it will be when attached to the aircraft as the aircraft would sit on it's gear. This is not a small airplane. |
 This is a template I made to plan the way the flaps will attach to the wing. |
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 This shows the flaps down at about 50 degrees. |
 The templates shown here will be used to cut the flap area out of the wing and to build a plug for the rear wing spar. The smaller ones have been sized to take the wing skin's thickness into account. |
 The flap portion of the wing center section has been cut out. The shape of the rear spar is now visible. |
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| Click on any photo to see an expanded version. | ||||||
