Flaps and Ailerons are done
I spent a long 9hr day at the hangar today working on finishing all of the fit and rigging of the flaps and ailerons. First, just to get warmed up, I installed a piece of 1/4″ ID silicone tubing to join the aluminum tubing coming from the heated pitot tube to the plastic nylaflow tubing going into the fuselage. The tie-wraps are double wrapped to provide pressure all the way around the tube. If you didn’t double wrap these particular ties (other products are made that take this into account), you would have a little spot right under the buckle that isn’t under pressure.
Then time to get down to business. I spent a lot of time fussing with the right flap near the fuselage. I had to jog the lower flap skin to allow the inboard end to come up a little (~1/8-3/16″) higher for a good in-trail position at the outboard end. I figure it is better for the outboard end to be lined up as it has a much greater rolling moment. With that taken care of, I finalized the flap linkage and installed it with final hardware. Up-Down-Up-Down…, yep, the flaps are ready to fly.
Next up, aileron rigging. I had previously just hung the ailerons with temporary hardware so I could get flap alignment worked out with the outboard aileron alignment jig. For the uninitiated, there are a whole lot of moving parts all linked together that make the ailerons work. To say that each one is very important is a bit of an understatement. I inserted the aileron pushrods that I made a long time ago from the wing tips and put some bolts in each end’s rod end bearing. From there, it is a big adjustment game with four rod end bearings on the ends of both pushrods. Both ailerons are interconnected via the control sticks. The idea is to get the sticks vertical with both ailerons in alignment with (in an ideal world) more than half of the threads engaged in each of the pushrod ends. So, you go back and forth making sure the rod end bearings are threaded in equally. This is done by counting threads. I only achieved the thread engagement target by about one thread. That is good enough, but if I were to remake the pushrods, I would make them about 1/8″ longer. There is little danger of them being too long until they are way too long. Before torquing all of the linkage, I made a quick check of the control surface throws. Note, on all these control rod assemblies, I’m torquing the jam nuts to standard shear nut specs and using loctite then finishing with a dab of torque seal.
Next up I’m going to install the heated pitot tube. I fished out the wires for that and called it a day.
