More Elevator time

Yep, this week I spent most of my free time on the 10.  The elevators seem to be taking forever but slowly they are coming together.  I find that when I reach a point where I stress about a particular step I tend to delay it more than I should.  Such is the case here.  I have been thinking about how to best rivet the trailing edge where Van's wants a special bucking bar.  Well I figured it out and think I found a better solution.  I like to use my tungsten bucking bar whenever I can as it seems to make much better shop heads.  I used a little gorilla tape and my old metal bolt gauge to come up with an interesting solution that worked very well.

Here is the solution...Notice the bend in the metal plate..that's there to help angle the tungsten bar properly while allowing me to put some leverage on it and not ding the lower skin.  One other note of interest, I did elevate the aft spar just about a quarter of an inch so that the angle was better and the flex on the top skin was less.

And the top rivets are the ones I used the special bucking bar on.  I think they came out better than the ones on the bottom that I had to do free hand.

And here they sit at the end of the day on Sunday.  Still not done but very close.  Just a little more riveting and I can start on the trim tabs.

OH, we got a little snow this week so I had to take a pic.

Last year the starter in the 9A broke just before I was to take one of my IFR lessons.  I replaced this starter with a new one and put this one on the shelf thinking I might find another one and between the two make one working starter.  I found out that Sky-Tec will rebuild any starter for less than half the price of a new one.  I took this picture as I was boxing it up to send back.  This will make a nice starter for the 10.  

The cold weather also prompted me to get my Switchbox hooked up again.  I took this picture so I would remember my account info.  This neat little device allows me to start the pre-heat heater on my airplane from anywhere with a text message.  Pretty cool!