My helper and I pulled the wings back off the plane so I could take care of a handful of things before installing them back on the fuselage for good. I swear I'm having a good time in this photo:
One of these tasks was to install all the countersunk nutplates for the the wing root fairings, over fifty nutplates in total. This took basically a whole work session – I just turned up the music and cranked them out:
Squeezing the rivets for some of these near the tank leading edge was a bit tricky, but I got it done:
The aftmost hole on the top skin was too close to the wing walk doubler for the nutplate to fit properly. Not sure if this was a plans error or a quickbuild assembly error, but I'm stuck with it now. I solved this by making a little shim to give the nutplate a flat place to live:
With the shim under the nutplate, it sits flat like it's supposed to, which means the screw will go in straight:
Since I've removed the old AFS AOA system in favor of a Garmin GAP 26 pitot/AOA probe, I had a few small holes in the left wing skins that needed to be plugged with flush rivets:
I roughed-in the wiring through the conduits for the wingtip lightning, and also ran wiring through the snap bushings for the roll servo (right wing) and pitot heat (left wing). The two sets of unused bushings in the left wing will be used for the pitot and AOA plumbing.
I left the wires extra-long and will cut them to a more manageable length later. This is a bit wasteful of expensive milspec wire, but still cheaper than having to replace every wire because they're all an inch too short.
