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Wing Kit Improvements?

fishbone

Member
Question for those of you that have started your 14 wings...

It seems the 14 kit is touted as having many improvements over the previous generation of RV matched hole kits. Are the punched holes truly already to size such that all you have had to do is dimple or countersink and go? Are there other notable improvements that will help accelerate the slow build process?
 
Thus far, the primary difference is the wing skins. Most of the other pieces require final drilling. There's a LOT of holes on the skin so that makes a difference.

As far as deburring on the skin, the vast majority of the final sized holes are very clean. I looked at several with a jeweler's loupe and found that I could find the few that needed attention by running my hand over the row of holes and address those individually...less than a dozen over left wing's top skins. Then I used a purple scotch bright pad over all of the rows, dimpled and primed. So even the deburring process is greatly reduced.
 
The RV-14 wing kit utilizes the RV-10 wing ribs and other misc. parts (part commonality... helps keep kit price lower). Since these are not final size on the RV-10 kit, there is some final drilling required on these parts.
All of the remaining kits will for the most part contain new design parts, so they will all have finished size holes.
 
Thanks guys. I'm contemplating a switch from the 9 to the 14 and am on the verge of ordering a wing kit so trying to gather data for a trade off analysis.

Thanks for the welcome Pierre...I have been reviewing the forums for several years and didn't realize I had never posted anything until I saw your reply. As has been said many times, this is a great community!
 
As far as deburring the wing skins, you should only need to debur one side. A guy at the factory told me that the side their machine punch enters is very clean and the side the punch exits has a slight burr, so only that side would need deburred. Sure enough, that's what I found. It's obvious which side is which by feel. But still no need to match drill the skins to the ribs. Just drill the rib holes to full size and dimple, then assemble. There's still a lot of time saved there.

I'm guessing later in the kit that we'll find more parts that don't require match drilling that are unique to the RV-14 only. That may not be the empennage since it's might have a lot of common parts to the RV-9.
 
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