8 hours.
Saturday was a pretty huge day in its own right. The night before, I’d cleaned up the workshop and put all the tools away so I could start making a fresh mess. I gloated over my handiwork in drilling the wing spars for a few minutes, then got going on the flap rigging. The flaps are attached at the trailing edge of the wing with a strip of piano hinge. The right side, the inboard edge of the flap rubbed against the fuselage, which didnt allow it to travel its full range of motion. So off it came, and I filed and scotchbrited off enough metal so that it did. However, in that sentence is contained about 4 or 5 iterations of trial, error, and scratching the crap out of the flap with the file until I got smart and put some tape around where I’d be working it. Eventually, it fit fine and was able to swing up and down, and in the ‘up’ position, the skin lay flat on the belly. The left side wasn’t a problem.
After that, it was time to reinstall the flap motor and rig the flaps. This is where the first setback occurred. The flap motor was one of the first things I did on the fuselage, so maybe I screwed it up, but there are many reports of the flap motor channel interfering with the canopy latch bar. Supposedly, they fixed this in the matched-hole kit, but I have a matched-hole kit and I’m telling you now, it ain’t fixed. What I had to do was put a 3/16″ spacer between the bushing block and the F-705 bulkhead to move the canopy latch bar forward enough so that it would clear the flap motor channel. I also had to change the rivets on the upper part of the flap motor channel to flush AN426 rivets. After this, I was able to see daylight between the latch bar and the channel. Of course, this also meant that the pushrod between the latch handle and the bar was now about 1/4″ too long. Put that on the list.
Then came the weird ceremony of drilling the flap pushrod holes. I”ll post pictures of this whole mess when I get the chance.
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