Yep, its been a while since I posted anything new so I guess its time. I've managed to get a few tasks done in the past 10 days in addition to all my travels. First up, I finished riveting the vertical stabilizer together. In the picture below you can see where I am slowly making my way around with rivets. I did run into one problem that took a little thought to solve. When I put the forward spar in and riveted it in place I failed to removed the blue plastic protective cover from the inside of the skin. After a few minutes of thought I finally come up with the idea of removing the top rib, stuffing a broom handle down into the opening, wrapping the plastic skin around the broom handle and then twisting my way down until all of the plastic was removed. It worked wonderfully and to top things off I ended up putting better rivets back into the top rib!
Next up was the Rudder. I don't have any pictures of the rudder itself being built because all I have done so far (except the skins I talked about in a previous post) is prepare and prime the skeleton of the rudder. I am waiting until my EAA technical advisor has a chance to look at my work before I button it all up. So in the mean time I started working on the elevators. The left elevator is suppose to be one of the hardest parts of the entire empennage kit. I will have to do lots of reading before I start work on the trim tab which is the offending part of the left elevator.
In the pictures below you can see the "jig" I set up to allow me to get into the tight spaces inside the elevator skins and match drill the stiffeners.
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| Stiffener cleco'd on with my improvised hold down device (lead weights in a tray). |
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| The inside of the right elevator skin as I match drill the stiffeners. |
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| The back side of the right elevator skin. Notice how its all bowed outward? This is because it was pre-bent at the factory and I have to open it up to work on the inside. |
