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Wing dismantling- RV-4

Vidar Munkelien

I'm New Here
Anyone out there who can tell me about difficulties or what to do / not to do about disassemble the wings from an RV-4?
I'm probably gonna buy one and put into a container for shipment.

Regards
Vidar, Norway eaa 573
 
I took a lot of advice from that post. One thing that simplified life was using a rivet gun to tap the screws out. The first wing took me about 4 hrs to remove. The second one took about half of that using the gun. It took me 2 days to disassemble and transport the plane.
 
It's fairly straight forward. But as alluded to already getting the bolts out will be challenging but not impossible. Just will take patience and a lot of hanging upside down on the cockpit rails to get all those bolts out. That's one thing you can say for the 4 and 6, they are built like tanks.
 
It may well have been mentioned elsewhere so apologies if this is a repeat. I think before you take the wings off it is worth reflecting that there are two purposes for bolts in the centre section.

i) bolts which are tying the two spars, L and R ,together, to make them into one.
ii) bolts that are there just for the purpose of carrying the weight of the fuselage on the spar. (Of course, before everyone howls, all bolts do a bit of this, though my guess is in the design, only 4 are primarily responsible.)

I mention this because the bolts role I dont think is widely understood. I certainly missed it at first. They are the 4 off .25" bolts neither along the top or bottom of the spar, right out against the side of the fuse. 2 each side.)

You can just see the heads of the upper ones, L and R, if you double click on the first of the pictures you will find here. Just above the level of the floor. The lower ones, vertically beneath, are not installed. http://gikonfuse.blogspot.com/2007/02/control-system.html#links

I mention this because as you disassemble you can reduce the way that unintended stresses flow.
 
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