Aileron Brackets & Flaps

The aileron hinge brackets are powder coated.  Since they'll get painted along with the rest of the plane, I considered not attaching them to the ailerons yet.  I asked on VAF and people said to go ahead and put them on since ideally all aileron rigging should be done prior to paint (even though you then have to take the ailerons off to paint them).  The powder coat has to be scuffed for paint to stick, so I went ahead and scuffed it with scotch brite before bolting everything together.

There are only a few bolts to deal with, but it took quite a while since none of my wrenches fit into the spaces very easily.  I ended up grinding off one side of an old 3/8" socket so it would fit on the bolt heads without hitting the side of the bracket.  These bolts only get torqued to 20-25 inch-lbs, but since the nuts have a nylon insert to lock them, first you have to run them on part way, figure out what the friction torque is for them, then add that to the torque spec for the bolt.  For example, using a beam style torque wrench to test them, I saw that these nuts take about 8 inch lbs to turn, so adding the 8 to the spec gives 28-33 inch lbs for the bolt to be properly torqued.  If you don't take into account the torque require to turn the nut on the bolt before it even hits the material, setting the torque wrench to 20 would mean you really only have 12 inch lbs on the bolt.  I did the same test for the inside bolt that goes into the plate nut.  The plate nut had a much higher friction on it - something around 15 inch lbs if I remember right.  After everything was torqued I put torque seal on each nut (or bolt, in the case of the plate nut that is inside the aileron and not accessible) as a visual indicator that those were torqued.

So  both ailerons are now done and ready for rigging.  I'll just store them until the right wing is done, then I'll finish up with all of the control rods and push tubes and get them temporarily mounted and out of the way.

Next up, flaps!  It looks like this is going to be very similar to the ailerons, only at twice the scale.  One major difference is the flaps use ribs instead of just stiffeners like the ailerons do though.  I pulled out all of the parts and clecoed and match drilled the hinge bracket assemblies.  There are three of these per flap.  I'm going to work on both flaps at the same time, assuming I have enough room on my bench without making it too awkward to work.  If I don't, I'll at least have all of the parts ready to go and can then assemble one flap at a time.