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HS

jhearnsberger

Active Member
When attaching the ribs to the front spar of the HS, the holes in the flange of the spar are not lining up with the holes of the rib by about half a hole. This goes for all of the ribs.
 
Call Vans!

Match punched parts are great - when the holes line up. If they're off even slightly it can result in scrapped parts.

I had a similar problem with the HS on my RV8. In my case, one entire skin of the HS was out of jig by about hole diameter. It forced a twist into the structure when force-clecoed together.

So, I'd recommend you call Vans. In my case, Ken Scott actually told me they knew of a bad batch of HS skins that got shipped out (and didn't tell customers :eek:). They shipped me a new skin at no charge. Your situation may be similar...
 
yea, well.... the bottom of my rudder was screwed up as well. I had trouble getting the two holes to line up between the spar and rib. The flange on the spar was a good bit higher than the flange on the rib. This was on the bottom right side of the rudder. I worked with the rib and finally got it to align. I then dimpled the hole of the rib flange to the skin to sort of stretch it and make them align.
img_0260_138.jpg


What else could I do on the HS spar and ribs besides order new ones?
 
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So which way is the misalignment? On my HS, the holes did not align perfectly fore/aft (across the width of the flange), but clecoing them was possible because the clecoed flange on the ribs flexes a little. Once match drilled with the skins, there was no more problem. Lateral displacement was not a problem as the ribs are flexible and lock rigidly once the skins are in place.
 
It was misaligned across the width of the flange like you said. The 904's were worse than the 1004's.

The clecos really did seem to do the trick. The flange on the ribs did flex on over.

Thank you.
 
After clecoing the skin on, I discovered that their are many holes that were not aligned that I had to stretch by clecoing. I guess I didn't notice this when building the VS.

Jake.
 
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