I spent a couple hours deburing the spar blank edges then took them over to a fellow EAAers shop to bend the spar flanges. I had a hard time locating an 8' bending brake locally so this was a big hurtle for me. It was a load off my mind to get this done.
We spent about an hour getting the brake set up just right, then made a few practice bends. Once we felt like we had it figure out we started with the main spar webs. We made the top flange first and used a scrap metal wedge as an angle guide to check the bend while it was still in the brake. Once happy with the angle we removed the piece and I put a center rib tight to the top flange and marked the bottom. We then bent the bottom flange referencing these lines.
Using the actually rib to bend the spars to match seems like a good way to do it. It took us about 2 hours to do them all after the 1 hour set up. I headed home with the spar webs feeling pretty good.
Later that evening I was playing with the main spar webs fitting some center ribs and positioning a nose rib to see how it fit. Something didn't seem right. The spar webs seemed to be a little too big. It's was getting late so I decided to go to bed and look closer in the morning.
The next morning I did some head scratching and to my horror I figured out I had used the wrong center rib to size the main spars. I had grabbed a center rib that would have a double spar cap at its position so it was wider than the rib that would position up tight. Since I have precut all my center ribs to size the rib I used had 1/4 inch cut off the nose so is wider. My main spar webs are 1/16 too wide which will leave a ridge where the spar is after skinning. I know this is one I can not live with so I got right on the phone and ordered another sheet of .032 2024-T3. I decided to take a day off from any Bearhawk work.
