§34-12, -13

Well, that took longer than I thought.  (So, what else is new?)

Page 12 is deceptively simple -- cleco & rivet the leading & trailing edges to the framework of the ailerons.  

Having said that, it is a relatively time intensive process with some 700 rivets that need to be set. I was (and still am) somewhat paranoid about the whole L vs R thing and went to the trouble of clecoing together not one, but both of the ailerons.   The leading edges are under a great deal of tension so I did a 100 % cleco as my test fit.   Both sets of skins looked great, but it was a lot of time and effort.  All of that was done with the skins still in blue plastic, so it all had to come off so I could pull the plastic and deburr all the edges, then get clecoed back together again.   My wife offered to help and learned a little bit about clecoing.  (She's OK with flying in planes in order to get somewhere, but isn't into aviation as such. The reason she offered to help is because she loves me 💘.)   Lesson:  pull the plastic and deburr parts before test fitting things together.  If they fit, you can go straight to riveting instead of backtracking all of those clecos. 

 

My wife, learning how to cleco.

 I put them both together again and started riveting.  I  got the trailing edge skins attached and had riveted the upper surfaces of the leading edges when this caught my eye:

Poorly aligned parts

What you are looking at is the hole in the leading edge skin but only part of the hole in the counter weight underneath it.  It doesn't take an aeronautical engineer to figure out that something is wrong and there's no way I'm going to be able to fit a screw in there.   What happened was that I got fooled by the initial test fitting of the counterbalance tubes and stopped thinking about orientations.  After the test fit (see previous post) I took them off to give them one more coat of primer and must have swapped them when I re-attached them.  I didn't think to double check their alignment before doing all of that riveting.

Today  I drilled out ~ 130 LP4-3 rivets.  I only messed up 3 or 4 of the flanges of the underlying ribs and that pleasantly surprised me.   I swapped the balance tubes and crossed my fingers when I put the skins back on and they aligned perfectly.   Finishing up the riveting gave me two nearly finished ailerons.

Left Aileron

Left Aileron (inverted)

Right Aileron

Page 13 was pretty straightforward and I'm not bothering to put in a picture.  I tried installed the lead weights inside the counterweight tubes and it's going to be tricky.  See the next post.