Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Flaperon movement obstruction

After installing my flaperons for the first time, I was concerned that the travel in the up direction was blocked by the collision of two rivets heads, one on the flaperon and one on the wing support. Here are pictures of the problem:
You can see in the slot the two rivet heads in contact.
To allow you to locate these rivets, I rotated the flaperon in the down direction:
You can see some abrasion of the last rivet on left.
The corresponding rivet on the wing is shown here:
This is the last rivet at the bottom of the angle, showing also light abrasion.
There is no adjustment anywhere close to this place on the flaperon which means that likely I am not alone to have this problem. The reason why this is not a big deal is that in this blocked position, the flaperon is close to full up deflection as shows below with the middle support:
Of course I checked the other flaperon and the same blockage exists with the same rivet heads.
The next question is: what happens once the flaperon is connected to the control stick?
I found the answer with the RV-12 of my friend Kim Mitchell who has been flying for one year and a half:
Lo and behold, he has got the same problem, just a little worse: on his left wing the two heads being offset by half a head, both heads have been half ground, letting the flaperon travel beyond the rivets for a full stop. As for the right wing, there was no offset of the rivets which butt head to head with the following result:

The rivet head on the flaperon is gone! The one on the wing is badly chewed:


My conclusion to the RV-12 flying pilots: Gentlemen, check your flaperons!
As for the solution to this problem, I will defer to VANs
In the mean time, here is feedback  from VAF Forum:
http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=88177

1 comment:

  1. Jean Piierre; Thanks for the great photos of the flaperon/hinge rivet interference.
    I am just starting on the wings and remembered reading about this on the VAF site.

    Jerome

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