April 21, 2020
Bending the front edges of the control surfaces was a pain in the ass.
The plans call for using a medium diameter round rod to form the bend and prevent the skin from just folding at a sharp angle. We started with the handle of a floor jack as our pipe and quickly realized it was too large of a diameter. We moved on the leg of a roller support tool I had hanging in the garage and while it was the right diameter, it wasn’t long enough.
Eventually we ended up giving up trying to find something we already owned and went to the hardware store for two 4′ wooden dowels. One was 1.25″ diameter, the other was 1.125″ diameter. In hindsight, the smaller one worked way better. We bought 2 since one would need to be cut into shorter pieces to work around the elevator horns.
We used the edge rolling tool to add just a few degrees of bend to the last 0.25″ edge of the skins, this made the mating of the two skins a lot cleaner. After that the elevators were clamped firmly to the table, the wooden dowel was loosely clamped to the table so it could turn but wouldn’t lift up and a pair of channel locks were used to turn the dowel.
In duct taping the skin to the dowel we found that a single layer of duct tape tended to rip right as you got to the last part of the bend, so we doubled up on the tape and didn’t have anymore issues. You want to put as much bend as possible into these edges with the dowels. A few times we thought we had bent them enough, but once we tried riveting the edges together, they just weren’t ready to sit flush. The edges where we thought we over-bent them usually sit beautifully flat against each other.
Initial Bend 
Cleco Check
Even after bending with the dowels, it took a lot of manual effort and hand massaging in order to get everything to sit correctly. A lot of the edges sit perfect with zero gaps, but there’s one or two spots where the edges still want to pull away maybe 1/16″ of an inch between some rivets. Luckily you’ll only be able to see the gaps if you get under the tail and look at the elevators from below, so we’re just going to accept this one and move on.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Hours: 152.5)