Many people want to remove their factory wing for paint, clean up, or just to replace the rusted screws. If you have ever tried to remove the old rusty screws, more than likely you found out the hard way that the screws are rusted to the jack nuts and they simply start to spin in the hole. This leaves you no option but to drill out the screw but you still have a useless, damaged jack nut in the wing. Fortunately, I am doing some R&D for future production items and I hacked up my perfect GT wing to show you what the inside of an undamaged wing looks like.
1st, here is what the bottom of the wing looks like:
I drilled holes through the top of the wing to show you the inside. These are the 2 mounting jack nuts that are on the rear of the wing. You can see how they have "wings" that simply expand inside the wing to hold the nut in place:
This is the front one. I do have rust on mine and you can see how this will cause an issue later on:
Now on to the solution. There are 2 ways of repairing this. The first is by the factory method which is a jack nut. These insert into the hole and you would use a riv-nut gun to compress them or if you are lucky, you could simply install the screw and tighten it down while holding the flange with needle nose. This is a picture of what they look like before and after:
The other option are well nuts. These are rubber with a brass threaded insert. The are installed just like the jack nuts except the rubber expands and acts as an anchor:
If you damage the actual hole that the jack nut sits in, you can always go to a larger sized nut. The factory wing uses an M5x8 bolt. The equivalent is a 10-24 or 10-32. If the hole is damaged to where it is elongated, you can use a 1/4-20 well nut or jack nut. This is slightly larger than the factory M5 screw.
