Elevators I

Before even starting these I made an ass outta myself.  Looked at these parts and thought, "why the hell did Van's send me used crap?  The had scuff marks, ugly bends, already dimpled, no blue plastic.



Wrote them an email asking for new not used parts, and got this friendly reply:

Most empennage ribs have strait bends so we can use 2024-T3 (hard) aluminum with blue vinyl. But if rib has compound curves, we must use 2024-T0 (soft) aluminum. If it’s (soft) aluminum it must go through a heat treating process after we press the part. We can’t use the blue vinyl with 2024-T0 (soft) aluminum because it will clog up the punch press and it won’t survive the heat from heat treating. When we punch parts without the blue vinyl It will have some small scratches in the part, so we use scotch bright pad to clean it up. The slight bend in the side of the part number E-903 is intentional to accommodate the overlap of the skins. You will see this on page 9-2 and 9-9 of the plans.

So ok... I'll carry on, hat in hand.

This is basically what you get after finishing the first page.  Counterweight ribs assembled and ribs cut out and cleco'd together.



The four skins are identical between left/right but unique top to bottom.  You have to bend some tabs, and the direction they bend determines which side they fit on.  Took my time with that, I could see it would be easy to mess up.

Horizontal Stabalizer

The HStab is finished after 87.3 hours.  This is where you start to grasp just how many freakin' rivets are in this plane.  The HStab itself is 11, maybe 12' wide and has close to 1000 holes.

The local EAA tech counceler Tom Olson stopped by to do a final inspection on this piece.  I had been reading some forums online where they showed some super poor examples of riveting in aircraft that were flying.  They hadn't crashed which speaks to the design of this plane, but they wouldn't have withstood the 6g design limits either.  So that scared me into thinking I need an experienced eye looking at my work before I moved on.  Tom had all good things to say, and even wondered if I had done metal work before.  We had a long conversation about his days working in my department 35 years ago.


Here's the front spar, doubler and attachment brackets on.



You use some of the longest rivets in the kit on these parts.



I'm slowly working the kids up to the point where they can make a meaninful contribution.  Here's Sawyer doing an excellent job of deburring a rib flange (aka flossing the teeth)



And some not-so-constructive playing toy swords with some stiffeners:



I let Sawyer come "help" me one day after his nap, he spent 45 minutes making a rough draft of the aircraft's paint design.



Here is first assembly/match drilling.  There's only clecos in half the holes.



The ribs after disassembly, ready for priming.  Just scrubbing these down in preparation for priming took the better part of an hour.



Dimpling the skins.  I really like my setup with just having the dimple die a little above table height to allow for the carpet.  Only thing I may change is to back it up a bit as its difficult to get some edge holes dimpled when the piece has to mostly hang off the front of the workbench.



Sawyer came in after a nap one afternoon and watched Ice Age.



Then helped me dimple, except he whacked the handle one time when he wasn't supposed to and made the first boo-boo on my skins.  Its not bad, and its on the bottom of the HStab so nobody will know.



Assembly starts with attaching ribs and the stiffeners to the rear spar.



Darn fine rivets if I may say so myself.  Sure love that pneumatic squeezer.



Dad helped for a few days when I was on vacation.



The finished product.  Whew that was a big one!