More Aileron Work   March 15th, 2009

I had some 2×8’s laying around. They were several years old and all warped. Rather than throw them away, I built a handy priming frame for all of the aileron parts:

And the last step before assembling the aileron was to countersink the counterbalance pipe. Rather than using a countersink bit, I just used a 1/4″ drill bit.

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Bending Aileron Skins   March 15th, 2009

The aileron skin needs to be bent to a fairly small angle before it can be assembled. Van’s recommends using a bending brake made out of 2×6 lumber. This is what I did for the elevators, but that was over a year ago. The wood became so warped I had to make another one. This time, instead of pine, I used MDF. I had some 2’x4′ MDF laying around, but I needed the brake to be just slightly longer than four feet. Rather than go out and buy a huge 4’x8′ piece, I made each section of two pieces, two layers deep. So, each flap is 1.5 inches thick, and 60 inches long. Because it is MDF, the brake is heavy enough that it won’t slide around like the 2×6’s I was using before.

The brake is so long it was much easier to have two people pushing on it to get a uniform bend. So, Fabiola got on one side and I got on the other, and we laid some weight into it…

Using this brake, and having two people doing the pushing, we got the bend to the right angle pretty fast, and the entire edge looked really good afterwards. Here are a couple of pictures of the ailerons fully assembled with clecoes, just before priming…

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