Didn’t spend much time actually constructing anything on the airplane this week. The last part I was working on is the flap detent angle. This has notches where the flap handle rests at 0, 10, and 30 degrees. Other people have added a detent for 20 degrees so I decided to give it a try. I spent far too much time researching other peoples’ designs and noticed some people added nibs to more than just the 30 degree detent as shown in the plans. Then I noticed a couple people mentioning the flap handle getting stuck in flight and it seemed to be due to the flap lever bending within the detent and getting jammed in–easily solved by modifying the geometry of the detent. Needless to say I fantastically over-thought the part and decided to go even more extreme and draw it in CAD.
I found SolveSpace, a simple parametric CAD program that is very intuitive, and drew my own version of the flap detent angle. Then I decided to cut it into aluminum on my wood-cutting CNC machine. I was trying 25ipm with .03″ passes and it was estimated to take about 20 minutes to cut. It was obvious I was cutting too fast–the tool was chattering like crazy so I quit and will cut it with the band saw.
I’m not counting all the time I spent messing around this week to my build time :-)
Here’s a video of me creating the part in SolveSpace: