(8-2 step 6):
It's a beautiful day this morning and we hope to get a lot
done. It's planned to get hot later on, so wheel enjoy the nice
weather while we can! Angela & I tag-teamed the horizontal
stabilizer rear spar doubler right off the bat. Quite a few 1/8"
rivets in here and it gives you some confidence in the plane seeing how
beefy this stuff winds up being. After the doubler came the
elevator hinge brackets. These are where the elevators will
eventually attach.
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Here's
a shot of the horizontal stabilizer rear spar with all the elevator
hinge brackets and the doubler permanently attached. We're
holding off on attaching the inboard hinge bracket in the center
because it attaches with bolts and we still need to get a torque wrench.
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(8-6 step 1): After
the rear spar came the horizontal stabilizer front spar. The
doubler on this one is slightly larger, and the spar caps also sit
inside the flanges on the opposite side so there's even more beef here
than on the rear spar! Nice!
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The horizontal stabilizer
attachment brackets attach to the doubler side of the front spar.
These are pretty thick also requiring -9 (9/16" long) & -10 (5/8"
long) rivets to reach all the way through! This proved to be too
large for the adjustment available with our sqeezer yoke combination so
we wound up bucking the 9 rivets in each of the brackets. Angela
shot while I bucked... lots of fun, and our first real test of "team
riveting"! We did pretty good, however, I think complacency set
in a little at the end. We had to drill out one of the last
rivets we did... a pain since this was the thickest material yet (i.e.
the longest rivets we've used so far!)
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And the finished installation of the doubler and brackets...
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(8-8 step 1):
Moving right along... I radiused the forward corners of the Nose
ribs in order to avoid the "bumps" in the horizontal stabilizer skins
that we experienced in the vertical stabilizer skin. After I did
this Angela clecoed them to the front spar and match drilled the two
additional spar holes into the nose rib flanges. After this, the
inboard inspar ribs were attached and the additional center hole was
match drilled into it. Now that the spar, the nose rib, and the
inspar rib all had the same 5 holes, she came back with #30 drill and
final drilled all the holes.
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(8-8 step 3):
After that came the rest of the nose ribs (cleco, final drill,
mark for removal later) & then the rest of the inspar ribs (cleco,
final drill, mark for removal later). Here, Angela threw the
stringers on for good measure and to get an idea of what all the "guts"
of the horizontal stabilizer look like... pretty cool! Next time
we'll get this thing in the cradles so Angela spent a little time
before bed getting those finished up. Should be pretty cool next
time :-D
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