Got my shipment from Van’s today, including the replacement for my botched flap rib. After dinner, I retired to the garage to get this thing up to speed. This is a little more complex than many replacement parts like this, because there are no prepunched holes for the reinforcement plate that rivets to the rib. During initial assembly, all this stuff gets carefully drilled in assembly, but I couldn’t really pull that off here. So instead, I used a piece of scrap wood to create a template to transfer to the new rib.
First I used the tooling holes in the old rib to secure it to the piece of wood:
Next I drilled through a few of the rivet holes into the wood. I stopped at three because all I really care about here is accurately locating the reinforcement to the new rib. Once it’s clecoed in place, I can drill the rest of the holes using the plate as a guide. Completed template:
The plate fit great, and it didn’t take long at all to get all the holes drilled:
Then I deburred, dimpled, scuffed, and cleaned the rib, blew it dry with the air gun, and set it aside to dry a bit more for good measure. While waiting for it to dry, I worked on the hinge halves and the flap assembly. Most of the rivet tails from all my drilling out were still in place, so I got to knock all those out. That, in turn, bent up the hinge halves a bit, so I also worked on them a bit to flatten them.
Finally, I went back to the rib and shot primer on it, just working inside the garage door. Not optimal lighting, but it worked fine for a small job like this:
That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow I start putting all this stuff back together again – hopefully without mucking anything else up…