Got a lot of work done on the flaps this weekend. Friday was a day off for me, so I spent the afternoon prepping and alodining small flap and aileron parts – ribs, stiffeners, brackets and spacers.

It was too cold to spray and scrub the larger flap and aileron parts outside, so early the next morning I hauled those parts over to the Hanscom Aero Club hangar and did all the cleaning, scrubbing and alumi prepping there – nobody minds a wet floor as long as you clean up after yourself. With that done, I packed up everything including primer, spray gun and miscellaneous supplies and headed up to Maine where my friend Antony Parchment, RV-7 builder and all-around great guy, allowed me to use his paint booth to get all those parts primed.

Antony’s paint booth is wicked great – it’s collapsible and folds against one wall when he’s not using it. I helped him assemble it and got right to work priming. Here’s the booth…sorry for the crappy pictures, I did ’em with my cell phone.
And here’s the flap/aileron priming in progress.
Meanwhile, Antony worked on fitting steps to his RV-7 fuselage.

After a hard day’s work, we hunkered down on some great Japanese food in Portland with Antony’s wife and a neighborhood friend. I packed everything up and motored back to Boston. A hard 15-hour RV workday, but worth it. Mission accomplished!

Still nothing to report, except the reason now is that I just got back from a two-week work trip to Huntsville, Alabama.

Nothing to report, I’ve been on a work trip to Seattle.

I’ve been deburring and dimpling flap components as time allowed over the holidays. Finished ’em today.

Now the fun part…over the last week I started deburring all those flap components, as well as those for the new aileron. If you have a Dremel tool, buy a 500 finishing wheel – it’s essentially a 1″ diameter Scotchbrite 7A Medium wheel for Dremel tools, and it’s freakin’ fabulous for deburring in tight spaces!

I repeated the Dec 7 process on the right spar, with the exception of one minor oops…when back-drilling the angle-spar-rib holes I managed to egg out a couple of them in the spar and rib. Per Van’s, the spar holes aren’t a big deal because the spar is sandwiched between the rib tab and the angle. But the rib holes were not so great either, so I took one of the spare non-prepunched holes (see this entry) for the details) and match-drilled it to replace the old rib. Problem solved.

With flap brace parts fabricated, bent and predrilled as necessary I started fitting them to the flap skeletons. The aft-most hole on the rear brace lines up with a prepunched hole on the inboard rib, so positioning the brace is relatively easy. With a cleco in that hole I match-drilled and clecoed the forward end of the brace, then drilled the rest of the holes through the rib. After making sure that the angle was snugly in place and still clamped securely, I match-drilled the angle to the spar…at least the holes I could reach.
The upper flap skin must be removed to finish match-drilling the angle to both the spar and the inboard rib’s forward tab – in fact, the spar is sandwiched between the angle and the rib tab. I know, clear as mud. If you’re to the point of building your RV-7 or -8 flaps, you’ll understand. Some holes can be drilled from the front, but the three holes closest to the angle – the ones that go through the angle, spar and rib – have to be drilled from behind with a 12″ flexible #30 bit.
The end result looks like this…
One last detail – that reference hole at the rear end of the brace gets enlarged to accept the rod end that attaches the flap actuator arm. Once that hole is drilled, two others are drilled for the nutplate that holds the rod end. A nutplate threaded on an AN3 bolt made a good drill jig. The forward nutplate hole is countersunk to accept an AN426 rivet, and according to Vans’ plans the rear hole should be too…but the rib really isn’t thick enough to countersink. I have some AN470-3 universal head rivets, so I decided not to countersink the hole.