Finished up riveting the Horizontal’s spars, before I moved onto riveting on the Left side skins.
While I was waiting for an extra set of hands, I started to rivet together the Rudder skeleton.
The instructions give you the option to use a blind rivet on the Rudder horn, but I opted to squeeze them. I had to put the shop head on the outside, but they came out pretty good.
The Horizontal skeleton ready for the first skin:
Once my extra set of hands showed up, we started to put the left Horizontal skin on.
Spent more time today deburring and dimpling the right side of the elevator to get it ready for primer.
The outer rib (HS706) is too compact to dimple the forward most hole with a squeezer, so you have to get a little creative. I’ve seen close quarters dimple die sets, which is basically just a bar with a countersink drilled in it, but we decided to do something different. We found that the full dimple would fit inside the rib w/o the squeezer, so we clamped a piece of scrap to the table and drilled a hole in it so the dimple set could be pushed through it. We then slide the rib over the dimple and tapped it with a hammer. Voila!
Top down view of the scrap clamped to the table.
Spent quite a bit of time prepping parts over the last month to start assembly of the horizontal. This included alot of de-burring, fluting the ribs and match drilling parts.
Speaking of fluting.. We struggled with the first couple of ribs, but found this great EAA video that drastically sped up the time it took flute the ribs.
Total Build Hours: 383.25
Empennage: 149
Fuselage: 207.75
Wing: 0.0
