These elevators have a surprising level of complexity to them and have taken longer to assemble than I had originally estimated. With this part of the process, it isn’t the large volumes of repetitive work that slow you down, it is the small detail work that takes a long time to set up and prepared in order to just get one small thing accomplished. Many examples to follow, but first, the accomplishments of the day.
First up – the trim tabs. I have riveted the spar to the bottom of each trim tab and am ready to tank seal the foam ribs in place soon. I got distracted by some other items in the build this afternoon, otherwise I would have just tackled this right away today. I’m not terribly worried at this point. As I mentioned, there is plenty of work to do on these elevators before moving on to the tailcone.
One of the more straightforward things to do today was the trailing edge of each elevator. While this certainly intimidated me on the rudder, I felt more confident this time because I had done it before. Sure enough – it ended up going really well. All of the rivets sat flush and look great. The most important part is that once again it came out razor blade straight. I’ve heard horror stories about wavy trailing edges and all kinds of crazy pillowing, but I haven’t had that experience yet (thankfully).
Next up on the challenge list was accessing the rivets at the trailing edge of the skin. There isn’t enough space to get a squeezer or a standard bucking bar in there. I ended up using a technique from one of the EAA videos (which I discovered by reading Ed and Colleen Kranz’s blog – thanks!) about how to access these. The long and short of it is that you end up back riveting in a really unique way by hitting a piece of steel with the rivet gun and use that to flatten it out. You can seen I had to really rig this one up this time. This is a good example of where 50 rivets took 30 minutes, but the next 3 rivets took another 30 minutes.
Last, and certainly not least, the lead counterweights. In one of the steps you are asked to remove the elevated center stripe (you can see this above) from two of the four weights. I tried to use my bandsaw but that didn’t work at all. It bound up the blade and caused all kinds of problems. Then my dad came up with the idea of using a chisel. Brilliant! You can see how perfectly flat and smooth the weight looks now and I’m incredibly pleased with how this turned out. There you have it – use a chisel.
Well that’s all of the fun the day would allow. I’m continuing to think about ordering the wing kit, but am stalling until I can nail down all of the parts and modifications I might want to make.
Total time today = 2.5 hours
Total time empennage = 120.5 hours
Total time aircraft = 120.5 hours