(9-2 step 5):
Angela got a little frustrated with the elevator tip ribs
yesterday and asked me to give her a hand. So after church today
while Angela headed off to work the first thing I did was get on
them. I first massaged the flanges a bit to get them more or less
90 degrees to the web. After that they needed to be fluted as you
can see here by the web having a bow in it.
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After
spending a little bit of time with the fluting pliers on the inboard
and outboard tip ribs they looked much better… nice and flat the
way they should be!
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(9-2 step 6):
Well, I can't say it was a piece of cake but the elevator tip
ribs are now clecoed together in preparation for final drilling.
It might look like overkill on the clecoes but a good portion of the
holes were just slightly off resulting in bit of tension on the
clecoes. I wanted to pull everything as much as possible into
place. There's a good portion of metal in these things
(relatively speaking) so they don't exactly "give" as much as the other
items we've been dealing with. It makes sense though since these
are where the lead counterbalance weights will be mounted to the
elevators.
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(8-13 step 6):
After getting the elevator ribs squared away it was on to the
main goal for the day… finishing up the horizontal
stabilizer! The first thing I wanted to do was clean it out
before closing it up. While bucking yesterday some of the tape
from the bucking bar left some gum in places, plus there were a few
scratches in the primer. So, I cleaned all the crud up, and then
touched up the primer. Then it was time to close it up by putting
the rear spar in place. It got pop riveted to most of the ribs
due to access issues. The remainder got solid rivets.
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(8-13 step 7): Once
the rear spar was securely fastened to the ribs the last step was to
attach the skins to its flanges. All of these were accessible
with the squeezer.
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Angela arrived home frome her
soccer game just in time to check out the finished product. The
parts just keep getting bigger… yeah baby!!!
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