The flaperon skin gets riveted to the spar by cleco-ing both sides of the skin to the spar and ribs, riveting the top side of the skin and then bending over the nose skin to form the flaperon edge. Well, sounds easy!
With the clecos in place, the top skin is easy to rivet.
After that I turned the flaperon over and removed the clecos from the spar so that the nose skin could be folded over. I’d read that this would not be easy. The photo manual says to use a furring strip and ratchet straps to bring the skin over while the DVD says to get another person and bend it over together. It didn’t look that bad in the video so I opted for that route and I called on Teri to help. She took one end and the middle while I worked the other end, putting in clecos as I went. This went pretty well until the very end, the last 4 or 5 holes not lining up well at all. We eventually man-handled it in place and cleco’d every hole in the hope that would work out any kinks.
From there I riveted all the holes starting up the ribs and then across the spar. Some of the holes on the spar needed a little help with the drill to get the rivets to fit but eventually every hole got a rivet.
Part of the process was also to rivet the ribs on to the angle brackets. I did this before riveting the skin but I now read that it is better to do this after the skin is in place, as there is a chance that this will pull the spar out of line if you do it first.
The good news: flaperon 1 of 4 is complete. And appears to be untwisted!
I had previously done a lot of the work towards the left side outboard flaperon spar so I thought I could get it to a point where it was ready to rivet. I attached the spar to the skin and drilled out the holes in all the ribs and the top of the skin to an A4 rivet. I then measured and drilled a rib angle to go on the full rib that ends the inboard end of the flaperon (where it will join to the left side inboard flaperon). Finally I opened all holes to the right size ready for deburring and priming later.
There is only one rib on the outboard flaperons as the outboard end takes a fibreglass tip.