STORING THE ELEVATORS
Before I can begin attaching the horizontal stabilizer, I have to disassemble all of my hard work. As predicted. I removed all of the bolts and washers from the elevator horns and labeled them for location. I also removed both elevators and did the same with those parts. Everything was put away with the honest hope of reuniting them all again soon.
ATTACHING THE HORIZONTAL STABILIZER
The next step is mounting the horizontal stabilizer to the empennage. This is where you begin to realize the importance of those two little pieces of aluminum you had to machine many, many steps ago. I ended up scrapping my first effort and rebuilding them. I am thrilled about this choice yet again after seeing this. The horizontal stabilizer is not actually directly mounted to the empennage. First, you must fabricate some aluminum shims to help raise the level of the mounting brackets. This is fairly basic work after all of the fabrication that has been done so far.
The shims are placed beneath the mounting brackets and the whole thing is bolted to the tailcone. Before the bolting though, a series of measurements are taken. You must make sure that from each tip of the stabilizer to an identical reference point on the tailcone the measurements are exactly the same. Think of this as squaring a picture frame. As a result, you should end up with a stabilizer that is squared to the forward face of the aircraft.
It is all bolted down now and ready to continue. I am excited to continue turning this pile of parts into an airplane!
- Total time today – 2 hours
- Total time empennage – 206.5 hours
- Total time aircraft – 215.5 hours