Just as soon as the parts had dried, I riveted the flap actuator reinforcement plates to their respective inboard ribs – making sure to get the nutplate in there too. One note here – make sure you squeeze the aft nutplate rivet before you put the reinforcement plate on, otherwise that rivet will be difficult to get with a normal squeezer yoke. The sharp-eyed builders among you will also notice that I used AN470 rivets here; Vans calls out flush rivets but I didn’t want to countersink the rib – it’s not really thick enough. I had the 470-3s, so I used ’em.
The next day I riveted the rear tabs on each flap rib to their respective skins, and clecoed the flaps together for final assembly. I’m not going to cover assembly of each flap, they pretty much go together the same way. Big thanks to Dave Rogers for letting me use his flap assembly V-jigs. I screwed ’em to my worktable and leveled them to each other – no problems.
One gotcha…after spending all that time in Antony’s paint booth, I realized that I forgot to prime the faying surfaces (i.e., skin overlap areas) on the flap bottoms. Since this is an area where moisture can get forced in between skins, I did some quick masking/alodining/priming of those areas and fixed the problem.