AZ Bearhawk

My brother Timmy has been a tremendous help on this plane.  He lives in California and makes the drive out here to AZ to help on the bigger parts of the build.

After I completed the internals of the wings and double checked every cotter pin, stop nut and nut torque we started the riveting of the top wing skin.

Amazingly we got the hang of the communication required and got into a rhythm.  It took two days to finish both wings, but it turned out great with only two small dents from wandering bucking bars.

My brother Timmy and I agree that the worst part of building an airplane is removing the plastic!  That stuff was really baked on there!

This is one of those things that can make you go crazy!  It should be a straight forward job, but getting everything to line up properly is really tough!  I persevered and eventually got everything square.

Here it is drilled and clecoed in place !

I kept the aux tank transfer fuel lines high in the wing.

The aux tanks use a facet fuel pump to transfer fuel from the aux tanks to the main tanks. I made sure that there was no interference with the aileron bell crank and the fuel lines.

The main fuel lines came out of the tank and needed to go through part of the rib. In this case a doubler was needed since the hole was through part of the lightening hole. Some people have used fittings to go around the rib here, but I was really striving for clean fuel system with a few direction changes as possible.

Here you can see that I decided to tee the aux fuel line into the top sight gauge line.  This allows for the fuel to not only fill the main tank, but also back fill down the sight gauge and push the little orange ball down, while fuel is being transferred.  When the aux fuel is being transferred and when the aux tank is empty will be clearly evident.

 

My trusty helper and I went to work fabricating the fuel tank straps. I used outdoor carpet to protect the aluminum tank from the steel straps.

I got focused at the task at hand that I forgot to take pictures of the process. This is the only picture I took! Sorry!

I created a water level system and spent the better part of a day leveling the fuselage and aligning the wings. Every adjustment made something else change.

After finally getting everything set, I used a set of drill guides to step drill the wing mounts.  This is one of those things that you don’t want to mess up  thankfully it went perfectly!

 

I set up shop in the front yard to build wing supports. I used the plans that Mark Goldberg supplied and they worked great!

Here are the wing supports laid out to support the wings while we drill them in place.

We successfully moved the wings to the hangar to fit them to the fuselage.