Time: 4 Hours
I forgot to post my work from yesterday so at lunch today I figured I better finish this write up. I had plenty of work to do around the house to get it cleaned up as my girl was arriving for a show that she is working in Chicago. When I got done with that I got a few hours in before having to go get her at the O’Hare airport. First task was to prime the long pushrods before I could rivet them.
While those were drying I turned my attention to riveting the smaller rods. They have 2 rivets per end at 90° to each other. Van’s calls for AN470-12 rivets here which are pretty long. I have read where other builders have had problems with the tail tipping over during the squeezing of these. They recommended going down a size to a -11 which is what I did. You have to go slow and control the squeeze as it’s real easy to tip them over. I know this as I did it to two of them! Good thing that drilling them out was not a big deal as the rod pieces are steel and don’t enlarge very easy. Taking my time proved to be the key to successes.
With both rods riveted I screwed on the end bearings and adjusted them to the required length as labeled on the plans. I then attached one end to the aileron bracket and the other to the bell crank.
Now was the time to get the aileron in alignment so that it is a neutral position with reference to the wing structure. Two tasks you need to do to complete this. The first is to get the bell crank in a neutral position. To do this Van’s gives you a jig that has a hole that lines up this the bolt used to hole the small rod to the bell crank. When the flat side of the jig is flush with the main spar and the bolt is through the hole then the bell crank is in neutral position.
Now that we have the bell crank set neutral the aileron trailing edge should be in the neutral position as well. To check this we use 2 of the tooling holes that are in the outboard wing ribs. You drill a hole for and AN3 bolt in both spots on some straight edge, I used a 42″ aluminum ruler. Then drawing a line on the top of those 2 holes as well as the bottom. This gives you 2 parallel lines from the two holes extended to the end of your straight edge. The aileron will be centered between these two lines when in neutral position. If they are outside of the lines the. You just make the required adjustments to the rod ends to get it centered.
I repeated this process on the other aileron and now have them aligned neutral when the bell crank is neutral. The last item I did was to blind rivet the ends on the longer push rods after the primer was dry.
