Ailerons and Flaps

January 21-22, 2004

Prepared flap ribs and cleco'ed flap bracket assemblies together. Fabricated the flap angle brackets and spacers.

January 24, 2004

Match drilled the flap bracket assemblies to the flap spars.

Match drilled the angle brackets to the inboard edge of the spars. These reinforce the control attach points to the flaps.

January 25, 2004

Match drilled spars, ribs and skins and bracket assemblies for both flaps. The bottom skin is clecoed directly into the table and holes in the table are enlarged to accommodate clecos when the skin is turned over.

Main top and bottom skins are clecoed to ribs and spars.

January 27, 31,  2004

Cleco'ed flap leading edge skins to main skin, spar, rib, bracket assembly. The bottom clecos holding the bottom skin on fit through the holes that were previously enlarged in the table top, allowing the assembly to lay flat for drilling the trailing edges.

The trailing edges have a wedge shaped piece of aluminum placed between the skins. Weights are place across a piece of wood to hold everything flat on the table so that the trailing edges come out straight. The trailing edge is drilled using the top skin as the template and then cleco'ed into the table, holding everything tight and straight. You can see in the picture above, I'm using a drill guide cut to an 84° angle. The holes are not drilled perpendicular to the skins. After the trailing edges are drilled, the remainder of the assembly is match drilled.

February 1-20, 2004

I spent most of the time during this period doing the boring and mundane task of deburring the rivet holes and edges of all parts then dimpling and machine countersinking where required.

The left photo shows me deburring the flap spar. The right photo shows how I dimpled the 3 aft holes in the flap ribs. The ribs are too narrow at the end to get a dimpler in there. I machine countersunk a hole in the steel angle to act as the female half of the dimple die, then used the male half of the dimple set and the C-frame dimpler ram to make the dimple.