Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Flaperon Hinges Installed

I wanted to get a lot done tonight and I did put my time down but it doesn't really show. At least that's my perspective on the results of tonight's riveting session.
I started clecoing the nose section of the left wing to rivet the first 5 rows of rivets (and the ones that were left open on the bottom).



That took some time and then the riveting was really slow as I didn't want to set more than just one rivet at a time per rivet line. The tension on the nose skins is quite high and in order to get a good positioning I needed a lot of clecos holding it down and go one hole at the time. Then all those clecos had to be removed again. Why, I'm not so sure. The manual told me to and I obeyed. Now that I think about it I probably will have to put them back in again when I finish the rivet lines. Weird.



The next step was to put in the flaperon hinges for the middle and the outboard side of the wing. That was a pretty tricky assembly. Reading the long paragraph in the manual I had the impression that it was overly complicated and I tried my own approach. That was to put in the hinge rib and the hinge itself all at the same time, holding it together with clecos.
Let me tell you, that you'll have a hard time to just seat the rivets that way. You might be tempted to tap drill the holes which will widen them and you might lose the tight fit this assembly is asking for.
I analyzed my approach and gave up. Then I followed the manual meticulously and the result was a perfect tight fit. Seating and squeezing the rivets on these hinges is a bit tricky and you will need to use the close quarter riveter which just barely fit in.


This is the hinge in the middle of the wing. The dark green spots are from primer to cover up nicks from the manual riveter and to cover up the rivets themselves (while I was at it).


Finally I put the top skins in place to see how the wing looks like and also to cover the interior from excessive dust (there's another storm forecast for tomorrow).
Looks almost like a wing now!

No comments:

Post a Comment