Day 61: Complete Flaperons Repairs (2 hr)

During the week, a new box arrived from Zenith:

This box contained my replacement nose skins for the horizontal tail:

And some 3-way LED lights for the wing tips. These lights can do the strobes, the nav lights, and position lights all in one unit. And I was surprised how small they were.

The nose skins went under the bench for use fairly soon, the LEDs went into the box o parts which will come in use some day later.

In the last post I had left two rivet stems in an L-angle that I couldn’t get out. I was finally able to get one out by a combination of snips and pliers until there was a tiny hole that I could get a small drill bit into. The other one I got out by using two clamps to give some support to the bracket, and then pushing it through the hole.

With everything now free it was a simple matter of repeating the assembly process. I measured the correct place for the control horn and drilled all the holes out to A5, placed the tip rib inside the skin and drilled through the pre-existing holes to get a good fit. Some minimal deburring later, everything was re-assembled and riveted in place. It all looks good.

Finally, with Teri’s help to keep it tight while I drilled the first two holes, I placed the new tip into the other flaperon part, drilled some #40 pilot holes, enlarged to #30, deburred and riveted with A4 rivets.

The flaperons can now go back in the crate and it is time to remove the tail nose skins – just run my video backwards if you want to share in my pain.