ORIGINAL: wsmalley
Some pics of the LE flaps mounted with full length piano hinge on the bottom. I use a laser level mounted on my camera tripod to check the surfaces. The light gives a very interesting flow over the surfaces and seems to 'flow' as one would expect air to move. I took these late in the evening to allow the light to be seen. Have my 3 mixers now to experiment with. The next step is working out the mechanical linkage.
Very cool. I was looking at where I wanted to hinge my LE flaps and I think I've decided to hinge them at the top rather than the bottom as you've done. I'll post a drawing to show the rib profiles.
I was thinking about the mixing and I've pretty much decided to hook my LE flaps to the aux channel and not have them mixed with elevator. Instead, I'm going to program the pre-mix to slave the aux channel to the flaps.
Thinking a little bit more about how they'd be used in flight, I've decided that the best way to do this would be to have the aux channel knob already twisted to full deflection, then control them using the pre-mix swtich.
When the pre-mix is disengaged, the LE flaps will droop to max manueverabilty. To retract the LE flaps, I would simply flip the pre-mix and the LE flaps would retract to the TE flap position (zero degrees). When I need flaps for landing or slow flight, I would then only have to twist the flaps knob and both LE and TE flaps will deploy.
This is much simpler than what I'd written before --too many knobs to twist, way too much pilot work-load.
This way, you only have to flip one switch to deploy and retract the LE flaps and one knob to twist to deploy and retract flaps. Everything else is handled by the mixers (Trx & on-board).