Horizontal Stab
15 September - 2 hours
The Horizontal Stabilizer (HS) build necessitated the purchase of the RYOBI 9 inch band saw which saw action early on in this section.
20 September - 1 hour
Took advantage of a break at work to complete the rear spar in preparation for Saturday.
Everything went well until step (page 8-3) when the 5 inch aluminum angle iron was accidentally gouged with the new band saw. Part re-ordered. See shot below.
22 September -21 hours
While we wait for the raw material to be shipped for the do-over we continue on with the HS build. These shots depict the HS build up to step 8-8 with the nose and in-spar ribs being installed on the forward spar. As we did on the vertical stabilizer and rudder all metal to metal areas were hit with zinc-chromate primer. Except for the band saw incident the HS build through step 8-8 is on track.
We determined that the HS could be cleco’d together and match drilled while we waited for the raw material to show up. Since we read the note about the nose ribs ahead of time the skin looks very smooth and came together easily. This is the HS prior to the match drilling, taking apart, deburring, dimpling, and final riveting.
26 September - 3 hours
Took on the task of match-drilling the bazillion rivet holes today...
27 September - 6 hours
Had expected the part to arrive by now so that we could manufacture and rivet the attach brackets. No such luck, but we continued to move on with countersinking of the spars, deburring, dimpling,etc.
29 September - 21 hours
The big day...we will complete the HS today and it will be a long day to do it. The part arrived yesterday so we could finally finish the attach bolts.
And finally let the riveting begin. It went pretty well considering the amount of riveting we had to complete. We found the difficulty with this piece was in the access for placement of the bucking bars. I believe we used almost our entire assortment for this round and found decided that the one with the smallest forearm was the designated bucking bar holder. Consequently, by elbows and shoulders were sore the next morning! The placement of the leading edge spars took a while and was the first riveting. Once we moved past that and into the attachment of the spar assembly it was a bit faster.
The HS is now complete and all were quite proud of the work accomplished to day...so much so that they attempted a visual of what this might look like once mated to the VS!
Total time on this section - 54 hours
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