Ribs for dinner

It's almost too cold to work in the garage.  Spring is so close...

First up was making a replacement compression rib on the right wing because it had several extra unneeded holes.  Looks like it used to be the root rib, and had a Sharpie note that the old holes were twisted.  That completes replacement parts on the right wing that I can tell so far.

Half of the ribs are ready to be attached to the wing, and half of the wings now are all pre-bent and simply need leading and trailing edge flattening and the installation of the right-angle stop brackets.  I have to be in a good mood and get into a good rhythm to tackle this job.  It'll likely take a few hours, and there are only 11 ribs to do.  Boy, it'll be nice to have the ribs done.

I don't think I've ever showed this Goat 3 rib with its different construction method and airfoil.  It was a lot (!) of work to build this compared to the simple upper ribs with flat-bottom, but it would have been interesting to determine the performance difference.  I suspect that there would have been improved L/D with the reduction of drag.  Sandlin's notes on the Goat 3 included both this airfoil and a wing area change.  Perhaps if the wing ever needs to be re-covered, that would be a fun change to make.

The shop also got some rearranging recently.  This wall alone now has six new 20A outlets that go to a new 50A sub-panel in my garage, installed around the New Year.  Previously, the whole garage was serviced by a single 15A outlet.  The CNC machine started tripping the breaker when I added a second vacuum for hold-down tooling and that set the whole garage rewiring project in motion.  As a side benefit, the new tool bench is much sturdier than the old one with a 1.5" plywood top, and this also opened up the long wall of my garage for better storage of the long Goat wings; with the wing tips installed, the wing halves barely fit, and were a pain to lift over the band-saw to hang for storage.  Great improvement.

There is a sticky situation with the flap/aileron not folding all the way against the ribs like they're supposed to.  The aft-most eye-bolt should have been one hole forward, rather than going through the trailing edge.  This is likely a difference between Goat 4, which is cable-braced, and Goat 3, which is strut-braced.  Unfortunately, moving the eye bolts means the jury struts will need a bit of rework, since the spacing will change by around 2 inches.  Hopefully there will be no changes needed on the struts themselves.  Next time I fully assemble Goat, this is something I'll be taking a close look at.