Wings stands

[jonbakerok]

I couldn't seem to find a plan for a set of wing stands, so I designed my own from various pictures I've seen. They seem to work pretty well, so I thought I'd save the next guy the trouble and post the plan here.

There's only two "gotcha's" to pay attention to. The first one is that it's important on each fork to NOT glue one of the ends, to give some adjustment to account for slight differences between the distance between the spars. This makes it much easier to insert the forks into the spars.

The other thing is that the root end of the spars has a bunch of rivets that make it impossible to insert a piece of 2" PVC without some modification. I solved it by reinforcing the PVC tubing inside so that I could grind off enough material to miss the rivets. I cut some 1-1/2: PVC tubing to the same length and then ripped it on my table saw into quarters. Then I glued the quarters inside the 2" tubing, using a paper towel cardboard tube to hold them in place while the glue dried. Afterwards, I used my hand-held belt sander with some #35 grit sand paper to grind the tubes flat on each side so they would fit into the spars.

Here's the plan:

[enyaw]

Here are my brother's and my stands, just completed this morning. Note that pivot is offset to allow for trailing edge extending beyond spar.

Note: Upon further reflection (and prodding from my brother), I see that the reason for the offset may not me clear from my description above. It has to do with balance. The additional bit of the wing that extends behind the aft spar results in the center of balance also moving aft about an inch.

With the wings on, very little friction is required to hold the wings in any position.

[Mark]

I used the PVC method with a slight modification. I cut a slit (red line) in the wood to the top hole and ran a bolt with tightening knob through the upper wood so I could clamp down on the PVC to hold the stand at angles. I used a PVC sleeve as a bearing inside the wood hole as well.