I've been delinquent in posting progress from this past week, mostly because there aren't a lot of pictures to share. The last step in pre-building the flaps was to drill the trailing edge and drill the inboard plate that mates to the rib and the angle I fabricated earlier (still just working on the left flap - Van's is sending a new main rib for the right flap since the kit was missing one). The large hole in the tip of the plate will get a nut plate and eventually a bolt.
That was A LOT of trailing edge holes to drill! The wedge gets located by using the other flap wedge to butt up against the ribs.
With all of that done, I started to take everything apart for deburring and primer prep. One thing I did decide to do was order new nose ribs though, so I'll have to deal with re-drilling them once they arrive. The problem was I did what the manual calls out to do for all other nose ribs, only realizing after the fact that it caused a problem. For all other nose ribs you need to run the front couple of flange tabs against the scotch brite wheel to round them a bit more. Otherwise the bend in the flange hits the skin and puts a dent in it. I went ahead and did that step because in looking at the flange bend, it definitely would have hit the skin. The problem is that these ribs are made of much thinner material than all of the other ribs up to this point. So when I rounded the edges, it took off enough material to make probably 50% of the real estate on each tab extremely thin. It was so thin that taking a file to it to try to correct it just flaked off chunks of aluminum. Van's said I could probably use them as-is since those front flanges don't really take any abuse, but the material is so thin that I'm pretty sure it would crack at some point, and replacing them down the road would be next to impossible without rebuilding the flap. So I'm just going to replace them.
