March 23-24, 2004

3/23/04 I worked on the Horizontal Stabilizer spar H-bar doubler HS-1007, and the 2 spar caps.
Lots of holes to drill and deburr.  More tedious work.  This time I didn't screw up on the spar caps
at all, as opposed to my V.Stab ones.  They actually had a note on the instructions that was
really nice, and should have been on the previous section, warning to clamp the cap tightly to
not leave a gap.  Use plenty of clecos as you go.   I also got to drill all the holes in my attach
brackets and they look like they'll work great.  I was worried because my saw took a bite out
of one edge of one bracket, so it's about 1/8 or more narrower than it should have been, all on
one side, but there's plenty of metal there to hold onto, now that I see how it's used.  Hard to
believe some of these little aluminum things can help hold the plane together.



Here's the drilled and deburred spar.



3/24/04 I worked on the rudder, now that the ProSeal has cured.  First, use a #40 drill in your fingers
to clean out the proseal, then use a deburring tool in your fingers to get rid of the ProSeal from the
dimples.  That took a long time....maybe 45 minutes or so.   Then, on to riveting in the forward
rudder spar and riveting the skin down.  That went great.  The pop rivets were no problem, and even
the bucked and hammered rivets went smooth.  BIG tip....if you're trying to do this without a
pneumatic squeezer and the 4" long-nose thin-nose yoke, you're just begging to waste your time.
That squeezer is the best thing I bought for this job.  I'd trade my left nut for a squeezer if
I didn't have one.   I was able to use the long-nosed squeezer to squeeze every rivet South of the
counterbalance ribs.



My rudder, with the clecos out of the trailing edge.



Looking at these next 2 pictures closely, maybe some of you can tell me how good your trailing
edges look.  Mine have little ripples where the rolled edge got a bump in it from doing the
dimpling of the holes.  It's pretty slight, and I don't care much, but just wondering if that's
how yours looks too.





Putting in the spar's pop-rivets.



The skin is all riveted on..



After this, I put in a little time on 3/24 alodining the H-bar spar doubler and the spar caps.  I figure
that I'll paint those with Akzo tomorrow, but I'll probably do the Mar-Hyde + Akzo combo to
the other spar again.  I just don't feel like pouring out a ton of Alodine into the big spar wooden box.
Maybe I'll change my mind later, but right now I think that's too much work for too little return.


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