flap pushrods

We are building an RV9a and are ready to install the wings. Searching high and low on the plans we cant locate any schematic showing the layout and location for the cutouts in the side skin and bottom skin for the flap push rods. the attached picture shows an oval cut in the side skin and we think this is where the hole will go for the cutout. Is this correct? Will this cutout be mirrored on the bottom skin? How large will the cutout be, and is there a location drawing that we have missed? Do we just start small with this oval cut and keep enlarging the hole till the push rod operates freely? Man this is the biggest puzzle yet, any help is greatly appreciated.. Cleves RV9a project

Yep

That's it.

Maybe this helps

http://websites.expercraft.com/PHVII/index.php?q=log_entry&log_id=4096

(keep in mind that this is an RV-7, might be slightly different)

Here is a picture from a -9.


and


Hope that helps.

Thank you

Thanks for the great pictures and some good advise. We can clearly see now what to do and how to do it. Thanks for sharing your experience. If you care to follow along with our progress here is our webpage with pictures. If you run up on anything that we can help in the future just shoot an email.

Webpage for N417CT

Postscript

Thnaks to all your help on this forum, when we actually installed the flaps it went very well. Here is how we ended up.

We started by drilling a quarter inch hole in the center of the racetrack oval. Then with a unibit we enlarged that to half inch. We transfered the centerline of this hole around to the bottom skin in the same plane. Repeated the drilling proceedure. That left a thin sliver of metal along the corner and we cut that out with a snip. We put in the pushrod and looked to see where it hit the edges of the holes and used a rotary file and the air drill to cut away for clearence. We used several different kinds of files too. It didnt take long to get clearence on the pushrod. The major cutting required was on a line fore and aft on the bottom skin centered along the rivet line to get clearence on the rod end bearing at the full up position.

A few pictures of how it turned out.

Flap rod at full down position pushtod cutout
In the reflection on the wing you can see the cutout in the belly skin

another view of the cutout
The blue lines were for reference only

We got a perfect matchup with the aileron

A short viceo clip of the flaps in operation
Everything went quite well, and we got 32 degrees of down flap.