Building came to a halt through most of May while I travelled overseas. This wasn’t all downside, since the trip was to the USA. Needless to say, I came back with a couple of suitcases bursting at the seams with aircraft parts!
Looking around the workshop while still jet-lagged, I decided to go ahead and tear down the left flap assembly, because it was in the way. I want to do a bit of priming around a few areas of the fuel tanks, and adding all the parts from one flap to the tank bits makes up a reasonable amount of material for a priming job. There’s actually a lot of work in disassembling and de-burring a flap, because there are a lot of small parts. The hours added up on this job and I was glad to not be doing both flaps at the one time.
Since I had great success with the trailing edge method I used for the empennage control surfaces, I’m going to use the same technique for the flaps and ailerons. I bought a piece of angle aluminium, 50mm x 50mm x 6mm thick, 3 metres in length, and match drilled the trailing edge wedges in place, right through into this section of aluminium angle. This provides a straight edge to cleco the flap to during assembly, and I’ll enlarge the holes in sequence and use a pneumatic squeezer to set the rivets, as described previously for the rudder.
Dimpling the skins was easy, as was countersinking the trailing edge wedges using the jig I previously built for the rudder and elevator trailing edge parts. After all this work I no longer had a flap lying on the floor, but instead had a spray booth full of parts for the left flap. I’ve got a few things left to do with the left fuel tank and left outer leading edge auxiliary tank, then I’ll get set up to prime the whole lot.
