With my experience on the left flap, I am able to jump into getting the right flap done in short(ish) order. I am trying to keep my experience on the left flap forefront in my mind, but even still I’m bound to miss something.
The hardest part for me has been motivation. Looking at the collection of parts and all the sanding, deburring, drilling, and riveting has kept me from working on on the project a bit. It was from sheer force of will that I would go into the garage to just make progress. Some days it was just to file down the edge on a few ribs, other times it was just to disassemble part in prep for priming or some other task. Either way, just keep making small steps and things continue to move forward!
With that all said, I basically follow the same steps as the left flap. Nose ribs and sub-components were already created, but I start to assemble the flap skeleton. Lots of match drilling, then start fitting on the skins. Match drill all the skins. Then it’s deburring and prep for primer.
With all the components primed, you slowly start to assemble. Dimple the necessary parts and rivet the sub-components. Then assembly onto the spar. I actually missed putting the edge break onto the skins prior to dimpling so I ended up having to manually do it with the duckbill pliers. Not as pretty as with the edge break tool, but turned out fine.
Rivet the top skin to the ribs, and the bottom skin to the spar. Remember not to install the blind rivets until you have the trailing edge in place. I also fabricated a TE cleco surface out of a Home Depot piece of angle aluminum. 8″ long and 2-1/2″ wide, drilled with the same hole spacing as the TE wedge. This gives me a nice flat surface to cleco the TE and skins to when I use proseal since my workbenches are not 100% flat.
With the pro-seal set, I then install the blind rivets on the bottom skin, then double-flush rivet the trailing edge. After cleaning up a few spots of proseal, both flaps were completed and mounted temporarily on the wings. I’ll need to remove them and the ailerons to get the bottom skins installed but that looks like it will be in another year or so (just before or after I move the project to the airport.). Only thing left is to pressure test and possibly repair any leaks in the fuel tanks then it’s full steam ahead on the fuselage.