Flap Pulley Issue

Well, we thought we were done with the left flap pulley, but there's a problem.  We noticed that once fastened in place, the pulley was slightly angled up and to the left.  I think it was probably originally welded like this from the factory, because the back side of the pulley bracket is shaped to fit the spar which fixes it's angle once it is lined up with the flap horn.  We hoped this wouldn't be an issue, but to know for sure, we wanted to test the pulleys with cable to ensure there was no problem.

To do a test run with cable, we needed to drill holes in rib webs #1 and #2, which required using the templates supplied in the manual.  There-in lies another problem!  Turns out the templates printed out from the manual were "squished" a bit (for lack of better word) and did not have the right aspect ratio.  Some of the template holes were actually oval instead of round.  Don't know about you, but it's pretty hard to drill an oval hole.  Some of the templates were worse than others, and when cut out, the original templates were not even the same shape.  After some investigation, Michael found that the original images had been resized when inserted into the manual (a Word document).  By removing the images from the Word document and copying them into another application, he could recover the originals with the correct aspect ratio.  This was a great find and the new templates are all the same shape, and all the drill guide holes were round.

Drilling out the rivets in the flap pulley bracket

After drilling the cable holes in ribs #1 and #2, we ran a cable through the holes, around the flap pulley, and to the flap horn.  We then tested the flap motion by pulling and releasing the cable.  It worked, but the cable was rubbing the side of the pulley pretty severely, and you could even feel the extra friction when pulling by hand.  Not good, and we both agreed we needed to remove the pulley bracket and fix it.  Bad news is that it was already riveted and epoxied in place.  After some research, we found that parts like this can be removed by softening the epoxy with a heat gun.  We drill out the rivets, and then applied heat with a heat gun (being careful to shield the wood rib and the fuel tank to prevent these from heating up).  This worked great, and the flap pulley bracket popped off.   Next steps will be to fix the bracket (or maybe even build a new one), in a way that allows the cable to have a smooth motion to the flap horn.  This will be more difficult since we now have holes already drilled in the spar, but nobody said building airplanes was easy.  Hours: 3

Correct alignment shown with a bent solid wire