REMOVABLE WINGTIPS

By Mike Pienaar

I looked at handling the wing with the tips attached and decided that it was just too awkward for me. I could also not see how I could support the wing to paint it with the tip attached. A friend used the following method to make the wingtips detachable yet still retain a very neat attachment seam.

METHOD

1. Rivet piano hinge into the edge of the wing.

2. Mark the centre line of the hinge

3. Cut the wing skin on the hinge line

4. Apply resin/flox mixture to the outboard edge of the wing skin that has been cut out . The idea is to bond the wingtip to the strip of wing skin on the one half of the hinge that has been detached

5. Apply release tape to the inboard portion of the wing.

6. Attach wingtip with clecoes and align with wing

7. The wingtip can now be removed and installed by removing and inserting the hinge pin as you do with cowlings.

8. The wing tip should end up looking something like this.

NOTE

You do not need to remove the trailing edge of the wingtip to be able to do this. There is enough room in the wingtip to extract and insert the hinge pin. I could not get the distortion out of my wing tips so I cut the trailing edge off and rebuilt it. I used this opportunity to "Hoernerize" the wing tips and extended the trailing edge to the same width as the maximum width of the wingtip. Will post photo's later.