The Rear Spar

There are two main points where the wings attach to the rest of the plane. The first is the main spar, which we talked about earlier. The second is the rear spar. Just like the main spar, the rear spar attaches to the wing ribs (we will talk more about these later, I promise!). The rear spar also has several doublers for additional brackets to be added. So you can see in the pictures below some of the doublers, and both the left and right rear spars.

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The normal process of match and final drill continues. Then remove the blue film, debur, and dimple where needed. At this point, I believe I can debur in my sleep! Since the airplane is symmetric, each side should be a mirror image of each other. While working on the aileron attach doubler, I noticed something did not look right. The two pieces where not a mirror image and I didn’t know why.

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I went back and measured a reference mark on both rear spars, the left was one inch longer than the right. I went back to the instructions, and sure enough, the right doubler was positioned one inch off. Off to Van’s to order a replacement part. Valuable lesson learned here: read directions, measure, mark, reread directions, remeasure, step back and make sure it makes sense, then finally after all of that, drill. Luckily all the other doublers turned out great. Next is to prime all the parts.

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Finally the rear spar doublers are riveted to the rear spar. This entire section was pretty straight forward. Next will be the wing skeleton structure.