Fit Unfinished Wings to Fuselage?

[Karetaker]

Curious if it is acceptable to fit my unfinished wings, ( top skins, leading edge and fuel tanks all rivited/ screwed In place) to the fuselage or should I finish the internal wires, autopilot servo, pitot tubes, etc. and rivet on the bottom skins?

[mfleming]

I can't think of any advantage to fitting the wings before the bottom skins are riveted on.

BUT I certainly would not drill the rear spar without the lower wing skins riveted. Setting the sweep and angle of incidence is critical. You might impart a slight change when the lower skins are riveted which might effect the sweep or incidence.

[N546RV]

Interesting, I was just wondering this last night. The reason for me is to enable making the holes in the fuselage sides for wiring and pitot/AoA line entry, mainly the former. My wiring conduit will be PEX tubing, and my plan is to have the "conduit" simply project into the fuselage a bit.

The "easy" way to do this would be to hang the wings with the bottom skins off, route the conduit temporarily with the inboard ends butted against the fuse, and mark the outline of the penetration. This is a lot more precise and foolproof than trying to measure the wings and find the matching point on the fuse, but of course the hard part is needing to actually hang the wings to do it. (hence putting "easy" in quotes)

The concern about drilling the rear spar, and having the bottom skin riveting changing things seems valid. And I'm not entirely sure I want to hang the wings more times than I have to...