I installed the left aileron bellcrank. Why did I start on the wings? I was too tired from shoveling snow to crawl into the fuselage, and my wing stands allow me to work on the wings while standing upright.

Then I made the left aileron's pushrod. This goes from the bellcrank to the aileron itself. Pretty easy...the hardest part, as with the elevator pushrods, is priming the inside. There's a much longer pushrod that goes from the bellcrank to the joystick in the cockpit.

Here's the pushrod, installed, torqued, and Torque-Sealed. That pretty much guarantees that I'll be removing it soon!

I tried to make the brackets that the ailerons hang from next. Unfortunately, Van's made one of their very rare mistake. These parts were labeled as Left, but they are actually Right. They're sending me new ones, but in the meantime, I have to find something else to do.

So, I started stringing wire through the wing. I have 9 wires, all 22 gauge. There's room for more, if need be. With the wing opened up, it's pretty easy. I terminated and labeled both ends. Why 9 wires? I have a bunch of DB-9 connectors.

I used the time-honored technique of printing the labels on an inkjet printer and slipping them under some clear heat-shrink tubing.

Another task I'd been putting off was making the fuel vent screens. These are to keep small Fellow Aviators from building nests in the fuel vents. If no air goes in, no fuel comes out and it gets quiet. So I cut the AN fittings at 45 deg. Then, I cannibalized a spare faucet adapter from my shelf-of-crap-I-kept-for-no-good-reason-in-hopes-it-would-come-in-handy-some-day, and found a little circular mesh filter. I cut that into little ellipses that matched the cut faces of the AN fittings. Then I glued them on with JB-Weld, and ground the rough edges away with the grinder. Now I can wring my hands about how likely these things are to pick up ice.

That's what these guys look like on the bottom of the airplane.

Doesn't look like 45 minutes of work, does it?

In an attempt to decide where to put stuff in the fuselage (such as ground tabs, fuse blocks, etc.), I cleco'd the front skin on. Now that the fuselage is closed up there, I can judge how hard it'll be to access these parts once it's all riveted.

So based on that, I decided that the ground tabs can go here. There's a 24-tab "forest" on the firewall side, and a 48-tab "forest" on the cockpit side. And it's all close to the battery so that the big ground wire is not too long. And that hole to the right is not a bullet hole, it's a #@&* up. But at least it's a big one.