Right Hand Upper Wing - Root Rib

So far in the Upper Right wing I've made the compression members for the outboard end of bay 1, inboard, and both ends of bays 2, middle, and 3, outboard.

The inboard end of bay 1, or the wing root if you like, has a solid spruce rib with an even heavier compression members then the one at the wing struts.

There is no center section for the upper wing, they added one on the TEN, so the wings just attach to the forward and aft cabane struts.  The drag loads for the wings are partially taken through these root end compression members.

All of this seems to have caused some problems with spars cracking at this end, only on the upper wings.  Their solution was to add some clamping plates to the sides of the spars, and to the top and bottom, we'll get to those another day.

These plates get in the way of the compression members and must have been a bit of a pain to install in the field.

There are 2 compression members which get glued to the solid spruce rib.  The bigger, lower, member needs to be notched to fit the end of the wire clip and bolt.

I used the Dremel tool with the small sanding drum to grind a notch for the clip and another for the head of the bolt

The forward spar has the nuts on the aft face so the notch for the nut is just ground a little bigger than the one for the bolt.

The upper stick sets against the upper edge of the spar at the forward end.

The aft end sits on the wire clip and one of the reinforcing plates.  I ground the end down to a tight fit on the metal parts, both 0.095" thick.  There are also 2 small notches ground for the bolt heads.

Rather than a lot of fancy carving on the end of the stick, I made a small shim to fit around the ends of the fittings by grinding a piece of spruce to 0.095" thick.

I used the Dremel tool again to grind the notches for the metal fittings.  The shim is glued to the spar.

The compression members are glued to the 1/4" thick solid spruce root rib.

The little block at the nose is for the leading edge to glue to.  I have no idea what purpose is served by the diagonal stick other than to stiffen the rib a little more than is done by the upper and lower cap strips.

The upper and lower cap strips are 1/4" x 3/4" spruce.  The upper strip doesn't go all the way to the leading edge, who knows why.  I actually did this just before I bought all those clamps at Harbor Freight.

With the glue cured on the upper strip the lower strip was glued on.

The rib just gets nailed to the end of the spars so I was able to varnish it before assembly.  I do like the look and smell of varnished wood.

In the warm weather I have this nice outdoor drying oven.

You can see the nail pattern in the ends of the spars, where the rib was nailed on.

I used similar patterns to nail the rib on.  Unlike the original, my spars were well varnished before adding the rib.