Flaps stopped working. Time to degrease.

My flaps stopped working this morning causing me to draw on my superior piloting skills. I turned around on the taxiway and headed back to the hangar. I'm just as happy it happened while I was still on the ground.

I checked the switch everything was OK there, so I figured it must be grease in the motor or some other problem with it. This is what I found when I took it apart.

I cleaned everything up and reassembled. It seems to be working fine now.

Yikes. What a mess. I read the reports of this and pulled mine apart during my build to hopefully avoid this problem. There was a significant excess of grease.

I hope it continues to provide good service.

Larry

Nope - it will be a regular occurrence.....

Ours stops every 6 months or so.

I believe the more current units are better.

I've cleaned my flap motor twice. I thought I got all of the excess grease the first time but they packed that grease in good. I think the second time was the charm as I haven't had to touch it in over 2 years.

I wonder if there is a batch of these motors with excessive grease or what.

I pulled mine about at around 420 hours, since I had read this is the typical number of hours before they fail and found there was no grease in the motor. I had not seen one with the grease in the motor but seeing this pix gives me the confidence that I did not have any.

Now watch, as I post this, my flaps will stop working if not for the grease maybe the contacts.

Scremm said:

I've cleaned my flap motor twice. I thought I got all of the excess grease the first time but they packed that grease in good. I think the second time was the charm as I haven't had to touch it in over 2 years.

Click to expand...

I cleaned mine out at around 50 hours, then again around 90. No trouble since, now at around 270 hrs.

If this problem has been posted before, I apparently missed it. My flap motor HAS to be an old one, since I would have received it with the fuse kit, which would have been around '99 or so.

The motor has functioned flawlessly for 265 hours over the last 5 years, and I've never taken it apart. Just tossing those facts out there for another data point.

Twice in 1750 hours for the Val (actuator vintage ca 2004) - I have never had to clean up the one on Mikey (3,000+ hurs....but who knows what vintage actuator!). Val's flaps are getting a bit slow - I might check it out again.

I must be lucky; my 2004 vintage actuator has 1100 hours on it, never failed or had it apart yet. Maybe I got a good one?

I have seen a letter or RVator article on this from some years ago. I can not seem to find it, but this was "apparently" limited to a some date range. I just remember it and checked mine. circa 2003.

If flaps get slow this one of the first things to check. The gearbox was apparently stuffed full and it then got hot and migrated.

IIRC

Intermittent flaps

At 89 tach hours, I had intermittent flaps this past week and decided to disassemble the motor to see if grease might be the problem. The flap motor would not respond when I put the switch up or down. Then sometimes it would. Then the flaps would retract but not go down. A nudge on the flap while pushing the switch down would extend them. Then they worked fine and I could not get them to not work. Geez. I couldn't ignore this intermittent behavior so I decided to remove the flap motor and inspect.

A good bit of grease was in the motor housing:


And on the armature and the end cap was all gunked up:


The allen wrench required is a 7/64th. I used some leftover wire strands to tie the brushes back for reinstalling the "horseshoe" on the armature. For future reference, Vans SB link is http://www.vansaircraft.com/pdf/flap_motor.pdf.

After cleaning up with some lacquer thinner and q-tips, I reassembled and reinstalled. Seems to work just fine.

The motor is the "new" Pittman brand motor dated 07-08-04, almost ten years old!

Ironically, I had just signed off on my condition inspection the day before the intermittent flap behavior happened. I cannot imagine that it was anything other than coincidence. I suppose I should add flap motor cleaning to my annual condition inspection checklist.