Flaps: Part 1

One of the interesting things about purchasing a partially completed project from someone you don't know is that you have to study their previous work and logs to get a feel for how they worked and more importantly how they documented their work. For me that was my first step in trying to figure out where to pick this project up. In my case, the Flaps and Fuel Tanks were mid-construction when I picked everything up. When I say under "construction" I mean that some of the steps for those parts had been started and I needed to take over mid-component build out.

I started by with the left flap structure clecoed, the right flap structure match drilled but disassembled, and untouched skins. After going through the logs and looking at how previous parts were completed and logged I started at step one of the Flaps, going through step by step even though they had already been complete.



When I started putting the right flap together I noticed two things:

• There looked to be some spare parts
• Doubler
• Nose Rib
• Some of the FL-1007-R plates already had their match holes drilled in them.

That left me with a bit of a problem. I went through the purchase history, but I did not see any forms for replacement doublers or ribs. I was not too concerned about this because I was pretty confident that the structure that I clecoed together was correct.  The more critical problem that I had was that when I picked up the box of components labeled flaps I did not know the order or pairing of the FL-1007-Rs. I played the game of musical flap hinge brackets but I could not for the life of me figure out a setup that perfectly aligned all the holes. You can see in the photo above about the best hole alignment I could get. I was left with a question of, were the R brackets not matched drilled (rather laid out by hand) by accident or was I just being completely dense in the matchup of components. 

I had one of two options at this point: drill out the holes and use a larger rivet or order a couple of new R brackets. This was my first contribution to the project and I had a hard time taking the path that was against the book. Speaking of books, I needed to order a new construction book anyways. The book that I had was from 2004 and I figured it would be nice to have the most current set of plans. I ended up ordering 3 new FL-1007-R brackets to replace the ones that already had been drilled out.




The brackets and new construction plans arrived  in a couple of days and after a quick replacement of the R brackets I was able to continue into new territory on the project and start clecoing the flap skins to the structure.

With the skins clecoed it was on to match drilling all of the skins to the skeleton.  I also spent a fair amount of time on the workshop getting some additional storage options.