For some reason, I was up in the middle of the night and my mind was racing about stuff so I went out to the garage where it was cool and did a couple things.

I started by clecoing a few wings skins on the spar to make sure that it was perfectly level and then I laid the left wing fuel baffle with Z brackets attached for the plans in a theoretical outboard extended range fuel tank spot. The idea is to figure out whether the stock Z bar attachment method will work in the outboard position.

Let’s take a look:

And finally,

In summary, it turns out that there are only 2 Z brackets that can’t remain in the stock configuration. The lightening hole problem (second to last z bracket) is easily fixed by reversing the direction of a z bracket flange.

The inboard z bracket will interfere with the tiedown bracket so instead of the flange facing inboard, I can reverse it so the flange faces outboard. Even then, it will still interfere with the z bracket. I measured the baffle and Z bracket and tie down together and figure out that those measurements will work.

I searched online and found a 6061 – T6 Z channel that is 1 1/8 by 1 1/8 instead of 1 1/8 x 5/8.

I have 12 inches of that Z channel headed my way now for about 20 bucks. Pretty soon I need to decide if I want to spend the approximately 1800 bucks for the extra set of tanks.

I finished up my pre-dawn work session by drilling the nutplate holes in the tiedown bracket and spacer, no pics.

At this point around 4 AM I headed back inside and got a few more hours of sleep. Later in the day during a local extreme heat advisory, I managed to cut two angle brackets to allow attaching each wings outboard rib to my wing stands. They need to be fairly long to accommodate the skin overlap, and these worked perfectly. I fabricated them from the fuel tank inboard tip attachment bracket stock. I don’t think you need more than about 7 1/2 inches but maybe I used up the stock for something I shouldn’t have. I can always order some more.

After that single 30 minute task, I was drenched in sweat and decided any further work needed to be inside the air-conditioned house. What’s something I can do for hours in the air-conditioning? Let’s devinyl some skins.

After 3.5 skins (of 8) complete, I paused for some afternoon swim practice for the kids. So far today, an hour on the tiedown bracket and angle bracket for the wings stand (spar), a half an hour on the extended range tank planning, and one hour devinyling skins. There might be some more time tonight for air-conditioned skin devinyling.

UPDATE: Yup. Did some more. Another 1.5 hours on skins (second half of #4 and all of #5) before dinner. Then…another hour late-night finishing the last two of the 8 wing skins. No pics of the finished skins. You’ll see them later, I promise. Oh wait. I found a picture.