I did some prep on the wing tonight to get it mounted. I was a little nervous doing this but my plan came together.
The wing itself is not all that thick, maybe 3/16" my biggest concern was getting a good bite into the fiberglass and I saw a post on this forum while doing some research that I thought was a good plan so I essentially went for it. I didnt want to rely on screwing directly into the wing and having the threads get damaged if I need to remove it at any point so here's what I did.
First step was to get it in position and mark it on the roof. I traced the base on the roof with a wax pencil and will use this outline later on. I marked both sides like this. The line is to mark where I planned to drill holes.
I struck a line across both sides of the bases like so and again, marked spots where I would drill holes, 3 on each side.
These are the tools I used to accomplish this and the hardware I plan to use. Solid threaded steel insert (not a helicoil), grade 8 bolts, rubber washer and grade 8 washers, drill and tap.
Drilled pilot holes at each location.
Drilled larger holes per the tap size and tapped each holes
Test fit each hole for thread connections (removed the thread lock later)
Got prepared for each side. 2 part epoxy rated for 3400 psi. Hole drill bit was used later to turn the threaded inserts into place, it fit perfectly into those notches and allowed me to thread it in by hand.
I mixed the epoxy, used the chopstick to apply some epoxy into the hole ahead of time to the inside of the edges, then applied a liberal amount of epoxy onto the threads themselves, set them in and turned them down into the tapped threaded holes I made
The excess worked perfectly to grab the sides of the insert, I left them about 1/8" from flush as best I could on each hole. My plan is to also use another set of rubber washers between the roof and the wing itself isolating any connection between those two pieces.
Now they cure for 24 hours and I will move onto painting the wing flat black to match the van (wont be an exact match but this will look better than white while I wait to get it painted.
I will post more progress of how I templated each side and will use those templates to align with the outline of the room to mark the holes I need too drill in the roof.
My goal is that these threaded inserts, epoxied in like this will give it tons of strength and lots of surface area to have a bolt go into. Kurt also supplied snap toggle bolts which I will use as a final secured attachment once the van is painted and the wing will never come off again.