HS spars

Today I disassembled the spars and completed all those steps I skipped yesterday. I polished the rear spar reinforcement bars, matched drilled those in place, enlarged the holes where the main ribs will attach, and match drilled all of the elevator hinge brackets.

After that I moved on to the front spar assembly. I match drilled the two bars of angle to the spar channels. The two reinforcement bars need to be trimmed and then bent to a 6° angle. I was hoping to do that today, but I ran into a little snag. After 15 minutes with the bench grinder and a hand file, this is how far I got:

You can see I did make progress, but I probably have another 15-20 minutes to go just on that corner, and there are eight corners in all. At that rate it will take four hours to trim these parts. I decided to hold off until I can pick up a bandsaw (maybe tomorrow).

So I moved on to the next step which is to notch out some of the spar flange. According to the manual, the spars are the same ones that the RV-8 uses, but need to be modified slightly to fit the RV-7. I had to notch the flanges back to about where the 6° bend will go. I then had to make a relief notch for the bend. You can see the rough teardrop shape of the relief notches in the following photos:

Time Spent: 4 hours (9 total)