After priming the flaps in my last shop session, it was time to start final assembly. First thing first, I went to borrow my buddy Mike’s heater. Its better than my propane setup. I’ve never seen it state “LO” as the temperature. I guess it doesn’t read below 30… it was 20 degrees F outside… and in the hangar!

Nothing warms my soul like a little beer!

The first thing I needed to do was to make a cradle for the flaps. Van’s instructions calls for it, and its a good idea, but you can probably get by without one. I used some spare board I had laying around. I screwed the two pieces together. I used an end rib to trace where to cut, and then cut with a circular saw. I used my belt sander to make sure the bottoms were absolutely identical so they would mount to the bench and maintain a true alignment. 

I attached the little brackets I made for the ailerons as feet and then clamped the feet to the workbench. 

The first step was to rivet the rear spar and ribs. I started with the right flap, which unlike the left, required shims. 

Both flaps with the rear spar riveted to the ribs. 

Next, it was time to install the nut plates for the flap attachment point. Don’t forget to do this before you close up the flaps!

The nut plate is a little odd, in that it has one rivet through the 706 and the other just through the rib. The directions call for the 706 to be countersunk for a 426 rivet, but there is no mention of the other rivet. The rib is too thin of a material to countersink, and dimpling would likely leave the nut plate slightly uneven. The course of action chosen by several builders is to use an Oops rivet, which needs significantly less countersink.

Here is my Oops rivet set from Avery. For this I used the NAS 1097 3-3.5. 

In this picture I have already countersunk the hole for the Oops rivet (shown on the right). I have placed the Oops rivet in the left un-countersunk hole to show how little it protrudes. 

This picture is a standard 426 rivet for comparison. 

Final products. 

Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures today, but I was able to prime all the parts for both the right and left flaps. Here is the end product. 

Today I finished all deburring, edge prep, and preparing for priming.  I realized that I had drilled the holes connecting the ribs to the formed rear “spar” with a #40 bit, when the plans call for a #30.  I quickly corrected that as well. After I finished all of the prep work, I set up the shop for the wings, as my next project, beyond riveting the flaps are all on the wings themselves. 

In the process of setting up the shop, I pulled Jim’s airplane out of the hangar. Holy cow was it hard to push back in! The new hangar has a slight incline in the taxiway, plus there are two tracks for the doors and a concrete lip. It was all I could do to get the plane back in the hangar by myself. It wouldn’t be as hard if we had his plane centered and the hangar was relatively empty.  Then I could just get some speed up and use momentum to my advantage, but with the wing and horizontal stabs close to the walls, I’m not taking any chances in damaging his plane. 

What I need to do is something like what one of my neighbors has done with a little blacktop repair. Unfortunately, with Jim’s plane off center, and mine eventually centered, I’ll have to do a bit more than three spots.