(9-10 step 6):
Today I don't have a whole lot of time to devote to building, so
I plan to sneak some in wherever I can. My first covert garage
ops involved gluing the trim cable snap bushings into the elevator
front spars. For odds and ends sealing jobs like this I'm using
an adhesive adopted by a lot of builders, E6000. This stuff is
about $3-$4 at the local crafts store.
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(9-11 step 3): Next
I installed the nutplates on the trim cover reinforcement plates, and
then backriveted the plates onto the skins themselves (the plans
actually swapped the rivet callouts for each of these). After
that I was off. Angela decided to take over while I was gone so
she jumped in and started backriveting the elevator rib halves to the
skins. She breezed through one pretty quick but then hit a snag
on the second. Unfortunately she found out the hard way about
paying attention to the plans (sometimes hard to do since they're vague
& incorrect in some places, but every once in a while they'll sneak
a single word in that makes a HUGE difference). You see, each rib
is made up of two halves. One half is made up of the side flange
that mates to the skin, the front flange that mates to the front spar,
and the rear flange that mates to the rear spar. The other half
is made up of a side flange that mates to the opposite skin only.
Intuitively she thought that if the smaller half of the rib mounted to
the lower skin on the left side, then the same would be true on the
right side. In reality though, the opposite was true. The
reason this is done is to keep the webs of the ribs facing inboard, and
the flanges pointed outboard. Well... the real bad part of this
whole deal was she didn't notice it until almost the entire skin was
done (double DOH!) So, while I was gone Angela managed to
backrivet 7 rib halves (56 rivets)... and then drill out those 56
rivets!!! I know I shouldn't have, but I gave her a hard time
about feeling like she had to outdo me on the number of drilled out
rivets... I might need to make that one up to her :-/ The
impressive thing is, she got all of that done before I returned, and if
she hadn't have said anything, I might not have known (she did a good
job of drilling them out!) Anyway... I was motivated to get back
at it, so I jumped back in and fastened the remaining rib halves to the
3 remaining skins... that is except for the one that's near the skin
dimple that contains the crack. We'll apply some proseal to that
one later so I'm holding off on attaching that rib half for now.
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(9-11 step 6):
After the rib halves it was time to attach the rear spars to
them. I could get away with this now because the rib half that's
not attached yet is one of the ones that doesn't have the flange that
the rear spar attaches to. While attaching the rear spars my
original intent was to place the manufactured head of the rivets on the
aft facing side since part of this will be potentially visible.
However, after squeezing these the shop head caused the flange to curl
up slightly even though it was fully seated to begin with. So I
turned the remaining rivets around and no more problem.
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(9-12 step 1):
Once the rear spars were on then the shear clips and gussets were
attached to the rear spars. After that I wanted to sneak one more
thing in before bed. The next step was attaching the skin to the
rear spar on the right elevator (not the left one though. Half of
those rivets are also used to attach the trim tabs, and that is done
near the end of the assembly) So anyway, I squeezed the rivets I
could on the right skin, and left it at that. Tomorrow Angela
& I will buck the remaining ones on this skin (the squeezer won't
reach).
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