There is a gear motor mounted in a compartment that sits vertically between the seats. The motor pushes an arm on a torque arm weldment that has arms which connect to pushrods that are connected to the flaps.
The torque rod is held in place by 3 bearing blocks made from high density plastic (one on each end near the fuselage sides, and one in the middle) which is both strong and slippery.
The outboard bearing blocks were done months ago during fabrication of the F705 bulkhead. The center one still needs to be done though. They supply it with the hole in the middle, but we get to drill it for the mounting holes and cut it in half.
I put blue painters tape on it so I can mark it for drilling.
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It's easy to drill, but the plastic heats very easily with the drilling friction, so it tends to flow out of the way and leave a smaller hole than you really want. I usually do the best I can, then later when it's cool I'll hit it with the drill again to clean it up.
Once that was done, I cut it in half.
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The next task is to drill the end of the flap actuator rod for a safety wire. This is to prevent any possibility of the rod end bearing backing out and leaving the flaps in some unfortunate (and unmovable) state.
This was tough - it's a tight fit, and you have to keep away from the nut (which is removed for this shot).
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| From Fuselage |
Once that was done I could work on mounting the flap actuator weldment to the floor and bulkhead.
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Next it was time to fabricate some parts - mostly angle or plates that will be used for mounting the motor in the flap channel. This is one of them.
This shim tube was fun. It's only 13/32 long - to get it to length I cut it as short as I dared with the band saw, then taped it into a drill bit and squared it off and ground it to length on the bench grinder.  | ||
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Sunday afternoon was absolutely gorgeous. We had a cold front go through, the humidity was bearable, and the temps were in the 70's, so I went flying. Our usual summer MVFR haze was gone, and you could actually see more than a couple of miles. What a great day to fly.
