Center Section Start

Moving on to the center section.  There is still a little work to do on the vertical fin but I want to work on the fir of the root fairing before I take the skins off.

The center section of the Aircam is a hodge-podge design.  It has a built up front spar carry through with round tubes to adapt to the wing spars which are round.  The rear spar is round tubes connected by two brackets.  There is also some conventional sheetmetal construction.  Let's start with the spar carry through.

This is another temporarily assembled structure from the kit.  Lockwood builds it in a jig so the dihedral is correct and to also locate the outer spar attach tube bushings.  I have drilled these to #30 only except in the middle which are #20 for Cherry Max rivets.  The #30 holes will be upsized later to #8!!  I do not have clecoes this large, at least not yet.

Here are the tube extensions.  You rivet on brackets for the ribs before installing them.  There are four ribs for this section. These are machined and anodized, they have a radius in them to match the curve of the tube.

Here I have slid one side in place and attached the three bolts

Here it is complete for this stage.

The aileron control bracket attaches to the middle of the spar on the aft side.

Now the the four front sections of the ribs get stiffeners attached.  Here is one.

And I built up four aileron pulley brackets that attach to the stiffeners.

Now its time to put these on the front spar.

In doing this there are some additional sheet metal brackets plus another machined bracket that will get riveted to the spar.

There is a lot going on here!

I could now add the stiffeners that connect the rear part of these ribs.

Some brackets that attach to these bits.

And finally an overall shot.

You can see another set of lateral stiffeners in the rear as well as the rear sections of the ribs.  The rear spar will attach to these ribs with brackets which I have not installed yet.

Here is the rear spar where the brackets join the tubes in the center followed by an overall shot

Of course all is just clecoed together for drilling to size.  It will all come apart for deburring and painting before final assembly.