I started bending the longerons today. Van’s tells you to use the template provided in the plans, but most builders seem to use the canopy deck section instead.
To help with the bending process, I marked off the longeron with 1 inch graduations. This allowed me to bend the part in a relatively controlled manner.
The actual bending process involved a lot of hammering and checking the deflection in the part. It’s easy to get annoyed that such a brute force process is used to make this precise bend. As long as you make the bend in slow and steady increments, it eventually forms to the correct shape. I didn’t get the longerons fully bent so I’ll need to pick this up next time.
