L-29C Delfin Stuck Wing Flap Fix

This weekend Vlada from the Mig Museum at Thermal came to the WWAM hangar on Saturday am with Lilly (the translator and his lovely wife).

Volunteers on hand were John Janesta (who we found out speaks Czech), Larry, Josh, Patrick, and myself. We removed the cap strips to the wing attach points, which, thankfully came off fairly easily do to lubing them up when we re-installed them at the last annual.

As suspected by Vlada the microswitches were the issue. However there was no possible way to remove them from between the wings without "pulling" the wings. So after 1/2 days effort we went over to the Cafe for lunch, and Lilly and Vlada went home to return on Sunday with the L-29 wing jacks to pull one or both wings.

On Sunday Vlada showed up at 0710 and we commenced assembling the wing stand to pull the left wing first. After we got the wing off, we found flap actuating rod blocked the removal of the flap up micro switch. We then went and pulled the right wing, and same thing. Patrick suggested pull off the electrical connections, leaving the bad switches in place, and install the new switches in the plugs basically bypassing the bad switches. That would allow the flaps to become operational and the flap actuating rod would move out of the way of the micro switch. We did that (now its around 130pm) and no luck. The rod still blocks the removal of the switch. By then Larry (c/s McGuiver) had shown up, but even Larry couldn't figure out how to get the micro switch out of there. So Patrick and Vlada reverted to plan C, which was pull the flap actuator / rod off the wing rib. An hour later the actuator was off and the micro switch changed. Re-installation commenced, and then removal and re-installation on the right wing. After both switches and actuators were back in (430pm now) the battery was too low to start the engine and test the system's operation due to repeated use spinning the jet engine to provide hydraulics to the flaps.

Vlada departed around 5pm and Patrick and I parked the T-34 and T-28 in the "new" (old CAF) hangar to keep all the planes from getting rained on. We plan on starting again next Saturday (4/17) to test run the jet and re-install the wings.

During the week (after work) the plan is to work on re-painting the red / black markings on the L-29 nose.

Jim