Tonight I started off by tapping the 4-40 holes in the tail light bracket from last night. Then I moved onto trimming, drilling and riveting on the top rudder fairing. Then I got started on the right elevator fairing. After trimming and drilling the fairing it was time to countersink the holes in the fiberglass. I got a little overzealous with the countersink and ended up wallowing out some of the holes to large…so the blind rivets weren’t going to grab on some of the holes.
Tonight I continued work on the Elevators. First I had to trim some of the material off the trim tab skins. Then I made the bends in the left elevator skins, where they overlap near the trim tab. Only I bent both skins in the wrong direction…so I had to take my time and fix that before moving on. Then I finished off the night with clecoing both the elevators together to be setup for the next steps tomorrow.
Today I finished riveting the Horizontal Stabilizer. Zak came out and hung out for a few hours and tried his hand at riveting. Today became one of those trying days when missing a simple detail in the instructions results in almost two hours of rework. I ended up riveting the rear spar in upside, and caught after setting the 200 rivets that hold it in…so it was a nice long session of drilling out rivets before re-riveting the rear spar back in, this time in the correct orientation.