Then I slid both trailing edge skins under the bottom skin and aligned both sets of pre-drilled holes with the ones I just made.

I then opened up all the holes in the trailing edge to size 30 for the now famous A4 rivet.

Here’s a closeup of where the two trailing edge skins are joined

And that completes this portion of the bottom skin. Next up, a lot of deburring and then we can reassemble and rivet.

After some lunch and shopping I got the inboard nose skin clecoed in place

I then started the painful process of drilling every hole in the skin to first size 30 and then size 20. Most of these holes go through the spar so they take more effort than usual. I was pleased that my drill was up to the task. On the other wing I had my Dad helping and we used two drills to make very light work of it. I am tempted to send Dad an airplane ticket.

I then added the outboard nose skin and did the same with that

I am pretty lax with wearing the safety glasses but this is one task that generates a lot of ribbon waste from the metal and they go everywhere so I was wearing my goggles like a good boy. Next up is to install the trailing edge.

Next I put the bottom skins on the skeleton and clecoed every few holes. It lined up real nicely, one small kink which I think will easily go away once I have properly leveled the saw horses.

Can’t wait to get to polishing the skins, they really do look bad.

Each skin takes various length l-angles underneath them to act as a stiffener so I cut a whole bunch of angles to the right sizes

and then placed them in the right areas of the skin and back drilled into them along their length. That’s a pretty glib statement as this is quite tricky for one person (at least with my short arms), but I got it done pretty well in the end, only had to remake one l-angle that moved during drilling.

Lastly today I put the flaperon arms inside the skin so that I could backdrill from the bottom into the l-angles that attach to each arm.

I had planned on doing a lot more but before I start opening holes to final size I needed to get the saw horses as level as possible and I noticed that one of the horses read 36″ on one end and 37″ on the other. The only way to change the height is to collapse them and I couldn’t both lift the wing off the horse and change its height so I called it quits for the day and watched some football on TV instead. When my wife came home from some work she helped me out so I should be good to continue with opening the holes and drilling the locations of the trailing edge and nose skins.

From there, I went about riveting the many holes. Here’s the root rib, note the AN3-5A bolt

Here’s the riveted rear channel

In another departure from the left wing I didn’t rivet the strut attach bracket as that caused us grief last time too (another tip from the video).

And here is the finished product. I do believe this is a much better job than I did on the left wing.

On the left wing I followed the photo guides and left the l-angles for the flaperon arms until after the rear ribs were on the skeleton. You may recall this did not work out well so this time I followed the video’s advice and cut and drilled them now.

Everything was ready now for priming and deburring but I’ll do that tomorrow.

So the right wing is of course a copy of the left wing. In reverse. Without the pitot tubes. And so you could just go to my Flickr photo page and look at the pictures in a mirror and we would be done. That works for you but sadly I can’t do any such trick to actually assemble the thing.

All I got done today was identifying the proper ribs locations

and clecoed them to the spar with their proper size holes.

I also drilled the holes for the tie down

and assembled the rear channel

All you need is some wood, some plywood (but I used chipboard that I had laying around), some wheels and some straps. Step 1 was to put together the base.

Add some smaller pieces for attaching some straps

Put some wheels on

Add some plywood strengtheners to each end, then nail some tie down straps to make a place for the wing to rest.

Finally the tricky part was to pick the wing up off the saw horses and tip it up onto the stand. Teri and I carefully picked it up and after having to rearrange things to make room to get out of the garage, the wing was resting snugly on the stand.

Then, I wheeled the stand into the garage.

For now it is where the build takes place so we need to find a space to put it on the other side. Once that is done I can get the right wing spar out and get cracking on the second wing. Summer is coming, temps are already bouncing off the high 80s, I want the wings done before it is too hot and I stop for the summer.

At this point I got out the wing root skin and started to see how it would fit along the root angle. It doesn’t. No matter how I push it or move it around there are gaps at one end or the other. I retired to the forums and I found pleas for helps and answers that this is one of the hardest parts of the whole build. Great. The good news is that this doesn’t matter until assembly time so I am going to punt it until then, and get on with the right wing.

But first, I installed the fuel neck trim piece I bought.

Note that I had to trim it where the nose skin would otherwise overlap.

Before this though I had riveted much of the nose skin, leaving enough undone for me to mess about more with the wing root angle later if I need to.

And with that, I am done with this wing!! Next up is the right wing but before then I am going to build a wing stand that someone demonstrated on the forums. It will allow me to store the wing upright, give me more chance of finding somewhere it fits.

To stop the top skin from flexing I built up the cork strips some more on top of the skin and I also made sure to add strips to the bottom of the tank so that the skin would not be touching the tank.
Prior to putting the top skin back on, the fuel channel was riveted in place.

The top skin went on, finally ready to rivet to the ribs though only on the trailing edge and outboard sides.

And riveted, the fuel tank is now safe and secure. Let’s hope it doesn’t need us to take a look inside.

Final act of the day was to ground the fuel sender and attach the sender wire.

All that’s left now is to bend the nose skin back over, rivet and drill the root skin for installation much later.

One side of the tank has a hole for a fuel return line and as we’re not using it(*), this needs to be plugged. Someone on the Zenith forums suggested a nice little brass plug that fits flush with the hole. It required purchasing a new hex wrench but it does the job nicely.

We next purchased several gallons of costly gasoline to put in the tank. I had been advised to use aviation fuel but then I’d be stuck with avgas in the garage until who knows when, so we bought Premium with the intention to put it in the MINI when done.

I bought some PVC piping to put over the fuel outlet and rigged it up to a stool so that gravity would prevent it from just running out of the hole, after all that hole is supposed to leak. The good news is that nowhere did it leak. We picked the tank up and turned it around to make sure that everything got a good workout and it all looked good.

With that done, we put the fuel into the MINI and the tank back into the wing.

and the top skin back on top.

At this point I noticed that there is a lot of flex in the top skin. If you push it just a little in the middle of the skin it flexes into the fuel tank which doesn’t seem like a good trait to have in an airfoil. In this picture you can see that the top of the tank doesn’t reach as high as the rib line so I can see why the skin flexes so easily.

I put some cork on but it isn’t enough to make a difference. I can see that one solution is to layer some more cork until it is high enough for the skin to rest on but before I do that I have sent an email to Zenith technical support about it just in case I’ve done something wrong. I do not want to have to unrivet the wing because I did something stupid. Looking at the forums it seems that other people have done what I thought so I expect this is what will happen next weekend.

Finally, at someone’s suggestion I bought some fancy filler neck trims to make the fule neck look nice. I didn’t get to install them in case its position on the top skin changes after I hear back from Zenith but they put a nice finishing touch to it.

Sadly I have to trim off an edge as when the nose skin comes over the neck trim will overlap but it is still going to look good.

(*) Those of you paying attention might be saying “but Paul, what if you go for a fuel injected engine won’t you need the fuel return line then?” and you’d be right. So if that does end up happening I’ll almost certainly be going with a header tank solution instead (which is what the Viking engine install does).