At this time the wings are finsihed except the bottom main skins, so it was time to build the elevators and flaps. The main problem here is to align these components on the wing. Misalignment will show, and it's bad for appearance and even worser for the flying characteristics of your ship. The plans show some completely different methods of aligning ailerons and flaps, so you have to decide what fits your needs. Most builders choose the female airfoil method: You fabricate a female airfoil by cutting out the shape of the airfoil from wood and slip it over the wing. This will help you to center the aileron an flap on the rear spar. I've decided to go another way: At first I've tried to eliminate as much variables as possible, as there were: Position of the aileron brackets, positon of the bolthole where the aileron bracket mounts to the aileron arm on the rear spar, position of the bolthole in that arm an finally the position of the aileron arm itself. Each of these postions affects the position of the mounted aileron, too much to handle at once for me. If you drill the aileron brackets to the aileron per plan and drill the hinge pin (bolt)hole also per plan (1 5/8 below the ailerons chordline) you have eliminated most of the variables and have'nt drilled any hole to the aileron arm or the rear spar. Now you use the method of lining up the toolingholes of the wings ribs and the aileron itself. These holes have to be in line! This is easy to do at the wings tip. I've installed rivnuts into the toolingholes and screwed in some bolds to extend the toolingholes over the overlapping mainskins of the wing. Now I clamped the outboard aileron attachment arm to the rear spar of the wing and ran a thread around all 4 bolts from top to bottom and back. Now I only had to shift the arm fore and back until the therad touches all bolts on both sides, and here you are! (It is neccessary to file down the W-413 and W-414 aileron attachments down a little, if they touch the rear spars flange). It will be clearer if you look at the images below. Of course most of this is not my brainchild, it's from Paul McReynolds and you can read the whole procedure in the '21 years of RVator'. That's a collection of builders tips from the factorys newsletter 'RVator' and I highly recomment it to all builders, a lot of precious information. Once you have the position of the outer aileron attachment, you can clamp the center attachment bracket in place by simply eyeing the gap between the wings skin and the aileron, you will do that more precisely later. Now I've fixed the aileron in it's neutral position and was able to repeat this with the partial assambled flap. Here you have to be careful, the flaps inner rib is not at 90 degrees to the falps skin because of the actuator arm, so take care. The flap is not completed as the aileron was, and there is a reason for that. If you don't drill the top skin to the rest of the flap, you can hang the assembled and clecoed flap bottom to the wing and slip the flaps top skin in place, shifting it until the top ends of your aileron and flap are leveled. Now you can drill a reference hole into both flapskins, take off the flap and complete it. Now the flap goes back on the wing and the positon of the flap brace will be found by using the same thread and rod method as the aileron was. Now the outside end of the aileron and the inside end of the flap are fixed, and if you run a taut thread from end to end on top of both components and align the center of both, it's done. |
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![]() I found out, that the cheapest airbrush gun (venturi type) is the best tool for little sessions like this. They are easy to clean and cheap to replace. My professional spaygun takes twice or more to clean and the result is more than enough for priming parts with this cheap gun. |
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![]() 1.: Load a row of rivets |
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![]() A jerk would remove the fixing angles after that, pleased with the result, drink some beer and look at this great, straight, shiny aileron. A jerk? Scroll down, please..... |
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![]() The aileron was lying on the floor, and I thought I had to throw it away. In fact the only major thing was this bow where it hit the rivet gun (see picture before, you see that chaos on the floor? It saved this aileron, because it bounces on the pressure hose and my right foot and both left no dings). Some bondo and it will be gone. Some days it's hard to proceed, believe me. |
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