April 19, 2020
We actually started the left elevator work yesterday, after we finished up the right elevator. Since we were on a roll and thought we knew what we were doing we ended up dimpling the trim tab spar instead of countersinking it as the plans call for. So, that’s the 6th part re-ordered. The hinge for the trim tab mates with this spar and it makes a lot more sense to countersink the spar instead of now countersinking the hinge to accept the dimples we’ve made.
Today we decided to do as much as we could on the left elevator until the trim spar replacement arrives and it turned out to be a lot more work than we expected. We made up the plate that holds the trim servo. This was just drilling and riveting two stand-offs to support the servo, but getting it lined up right proved challenging. Once riveted together, we tried to install it and found the stand-offs were too far aft, preventing everything from lining up. So we drilled out the 6 rivets, ground down the stand-offs a bit and re-riveted. Everything fits nicely now and we have the first access plate part screwed onto the airplane.
Servo & Plate 
Installed 
Access Panel
Next up the plans called for bending the tabs where the trim tab mates. It would’ve been a lot easier to do this before the stiffeners were installed and before anything was dimpled. Another case of the plans being in a less logical order than we expected. We managed a set up of many blocks of wood, a few clamps, a metal bar and me leaning into the wood while Paul hammered on the tabs. It turned out alright, but didn’t need to be as hard as it was.
After that, it was mostly the same as the right elevator. Assemble the spar, attach the elevator horn, insert some RTV on the stiffeners, finish the trailing edge bend and rivet the skin on.
Left Elevator Spar 
Trailing Edge Bending 
RTV
In thinking through the rivet order and whether we could rivet everything together before receiving the new trim spar we discovered the plans showed four holes in a place where we thought we had only three. Turned out that the tape we’d used to prevent primer overspray was hiding a hole we hadn’t deburred or dimpled. Luckily, the RTV hadn’t set yet so we were able to open up the skin part way and get the pop rivet dimpler in and didn’t need to take the whole skin off to use the DRDT-2.
It was a really lucky catch, I’m not sure what we would’ve done if we missed it but it’s the second time in two days we’ve moved too quickly. Maybe we’ll learn to slow down, but we don’t have a great record so far. Needless to say, we called it a day and decided to put off riveting the skin on tomorrow.
Cheers,
-Kacy
(Total Build Time: 146.0 hrs)