March 25 & 26, 2020
More bucking today. Well actually, only really bucking today. I guess that’s not entirely true, but most of today was spent on the vertical stab. First was to countersink the spar reinforcement.
Post Countersinking 
Spot Priming
It’d be great if the instructions had you do this before they told you to “deburr/dimple/prime” everything. We ended up having to touch up the spar with some SEM primer after countersinking the holes. We’ll attempt to read further ahead in the instructions from now on, but spoiler alert, we’re going to fail at this goal – a lot.
All the skeleton pieces went together easily with no big gotchas. We spent a lot of time drilling out rivets in the skin that didn’t want to sit flush though. Some were acceptable from a strength standpoint, but we really wanted a nice looking, perfectly flush tail.
We got all the skin rivets that required a rivet gun installed first, now to finish up all the edge rivets with the squeezer. Gonna say this one more time, the pneumatic squeezer is by far the favorite tool so far in the build. Getting it setup for each rivet length takes about a minute, and after that you just move down the line for damn near perfect rivets every time. We ended up with a small count of Oops rivets in the vertical from the gun, but once again, overall happy with the way everything ended up looking when we were finished.
Horizontal Stabilizer 
Vertical Stabilizer
Now that we’re done with the stabilizers for the time being we had to figuer out where to store them. The garage gets crowded pretty quickly with everything on the floor so we settled on the rafters. It stresses me out a tiny bit, but they are securely strapped and protected by cardboard. It’ll all be fine.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Time: 77.5 hrs)