Building process is going slow because of the holidays. Hope to be back on task after the new year.

These holes are quite a bit bigger than one would expect. In my case, the part on the side was pretty small, but the bottom portion was very large. The rod moves fore, aft, inboard and outboard more than you would think. I made the mistake of not shortening the threaded tubes which resulted in a slightly larger hole on the left side. I measured the angle of travel on the flaps and I can only seem to get the bare minimum of 32 degrees. I don't see how I can get any more because I'm limited on the travel on the flap motor.

I'm going to steal an idea from the VAF list and use a foam brush glued into place with a slot in it. This should keep the cold air out and still let the rod move.

Also in the morning I fitted the stick linkages to the alierons. I can now successfully wiggle the alierons. I did find that my alieron rod holes are too small, so I'll have to grind away some there to get unrestricted travel. I'm getting pretty comfortable with taking metal these days.

I had one issue where I ground away too much material on the right stick weldments. This was because I was setting it up to fit into the left side yoke. I decided I would try a fix before I committed to ordering a new one, so I took a grade 8 washer and drilled the hole out to 3/8" which would allow the brass bushing to go inside of it. (The bushing was not shortened, it was the correct length.) So this was just a spacer to give the stick tube a surface to ride against. It's a fine line, I don't want any control surface drag, but I don't want a lot of slop either. This solution worked out great.

Everything seems to fit well, but there is some concern on the right flap, it doesn't seem to want to nest up against the fuselage. The left one is near perfect. I'm hoping once I set the angle of incidence it will be better.

In the afternoon Jon and Dave came over to help us put the wings on. The first one took about 20 minutes to get figure out where to line up the holes and deal with the lower fuselage skin. After that, the second wing took about 10 minutes. That's always the case with building anything on the airplane, the first one takes forever, the second one is a breeze.

I've taken the next 2 days off from work, so I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the garage working on the plane.

Next we ran the conduit into the snap bushings which was rough going on the left since there was a bit of a jog it had to make. There is no way that this stuff is backing out of these holes, good solid fit.

Overall it was pretty straight forward, I estimated the location per the . It's just a general location. I ended up making a 7/8" hole to allow for snap bushings to fit. There is plenty of material left, so I expect any issues.

Getting the inner 3 ribs that make up the wing walk doubler presents a bit of a challenge. Getting a pilot hole isn't too bad, but there are several bit changes so that you can step up to each unibit size and get it through the proceeding hole. I need a different drill extension to finish things up. I expect to get it done tomorrow and get the conduit installed.

I also had to finish the alieron push tubes. I made one end and waited until now to try and figure out the best possible length. The drawing length of 27-1/8" is a bit on the short side if you ask me. I seemed to end up with a little less than half the threads in the heim joint. All in all, everything worked out. Now I need to fit the right side and then final attach the bell cranks. The right side should go faster now that I know what I'm doing.

So I looked through the manifest and I didn't receive any 3-3 rivets with the wings. I certainly didn't have enough left from the empennage section. I did get a giant pile of 3-3.5. So I fitted some and temporarily attached the flap and alieron to make sure they wouldn't hit. The alieron does slightly on full up, but I think the "full up" position I had is well past the designed limit.

Later we were looking at how to install the flap gap faring. Because I got a quickbuild wing, it looks like I have to use pop-rivets for half of the faring. I could probably wedge my arm up there, but I wouldn't be able to tell if I got them correctly, so I guess that's just the way it has to be.

The newly air conditioned garage space is really working out well.

DO NOT RUSH! You WILL make mistakes that way.

Kim and I spent the afternoon preping all the parts to be primed. She helped me dump the primer into the tubes and roll them around. Otherwise I sprayed all the remaining bits, so later this weekend we can final attach them.

Tonight Kim and I deburred the holes in the bottom skins.

In the evening, we pulled the bottom skins off and drilled the remaining holes that the pre-built side were already done. I then dimpled the wing ribs and rear spar holes on the right wing.

Once situated, I started with removing the blue plastic around the rivet holes. My plan is to get the alieron hinges, wing and alieron gap faring and the bottom skin drilled, deburred, dimpled and primed at once. Then I'll install the hinges and gap farings, which will pretty much finish my work on the wings until I get all my avionics decided on.

So I'm sort of holding off right now while I explore conduit options that may let me defer some equipment decisions until after Sun n' Fun.

Mainly I need to sort out what I'm going to do with my pitot tube and wiring. I also mocked up the brackets for the aileron that still need to be built. Lastly I went over the construction of the ailerons. They are basically complete except that I have to drill out the brackets to final size and bolt them on. As soon as I can dig out the bolts I'm going to do that and they are done.

In a way this is good because it forces you to actually look over the entire wing and learn what all the parts are. We started to run out of heat in the garage. We were moving into the coldest days of the year so far, and Kim's temperature tollerance is not as low as mine.

That evening we began the ugly search through all the paper. As you can see from the pictures, we started running out of space during the unpacking. Also, there is a new hunk of the Amazon rainforest that is gone for all the paper that was used for packing.

The picture of the friends helping didn't turn out at all, but I want to say a big thanks to Ken French, Dave Hintenlang, Steve Ulmer, Joe Lisanke, David Courtney, Jon Simonds and Kim. Having so many made for quick work to get the truck unloaded and safely in the garage.