14 Jan 11 Wing stands

As part of the getting-back-at-it process, I decided to work on something that i could easily finish quickly. As many builders have advised, building an entire airplane is impossibly daunting, but just finishing that next task is doable. I am not certain of how much space I can take over in my parents garage, and I decided accordingly that i wouldn’t want to mount the 4×4 wing stands right into the floor and ceiling. So I went online and hunted through other build logs to see what others had done that was a little more movable. I ended up roughly copying another Andrew building an RV7 (http://n999za.wordpress.com/builders-log).

First step was to run to my local builders supply store Home Depot. I picked up 2 4x4x8′ that were really nice, and had them cut in half. I also bought a number of 2x4s and some MDF boards which were precut to 2’x4′, 2 lengths of angle aluminum 1.5×1.5 and 2×2, 4 3/8th threaded rods, and a bunch of 1/4 20 and 3/8 hardware.

I sketched up the layout on the MDF and went to cutting the braces. In no time I was ready to start putting these together.

The final assembly and leveling took a bit longer that I thought it might. There’s a lot of things to screw together and I wanted to predrill and countersink everything. Not hard, just takes a while when things start to get heavy.

I used a level to make sure the ends were level with each other, and that the wings would lay level.

I used a laser level to make sure they were at the same height, in case the garage is slopped:

But by the end of evening, i had my spars laid up in their new jigs. Now all i need to do is build a wing around them!