Flap Assemblies

Today was another productive day on the RV, we got started on the flap assemblies. After poring over the plans for a bit we began to get a picture of how they were constructed and what went where. We jumped to this because we're still waiting to buy more primer, and besides it hasn't been the nicest out for priming.

The construction of the flaps starts by clecoing the end and center ribs to the flap spar and match drilling all of it. The holes for the center ribs are punched a bit small, and they get drilled out to #30 to accept the LP 4-3 blind rivets that are supplied. These rivets hold all of the flap ribs to the spar. We also fabricated the small spacers that fit underneath the trailing end of the end ribs. Once this was done we clecoed the assembly to the bottom skin and match drilled it. It started to look like a flap!

The manual tells you to look out for small gaps that may occur between the "trailing edge" of the bottom skin and the center ribs, if there are any, you have to make small spacers to fit the gap. We only needed to make two of these and made them out of the ".025 T-3 sheet. This fit perfectly and made for a snug fit.

We began to work on the piano hinge for the flap and decided we would follow our friend Dwayne's idea and split the hinge pin into two pieces that secure to the flap brace on the wing towards the center of it. This requires a few of the links to be removed in order to be able to access the pins. We're going to save this for a later date though once we have our pile of parts primed and once we catch up!