May 15, 2020
After a couple of days lost in the mail, the replacement trim tab hinge came in. It didn’t take long to mock it up and cut it to size now that I saw how everything was supposed to go together.
An hour or so later and everything on the trim tab was done except the electric servo. The pre-cut hole for the actuator arm doesn’t allow full movement of the trim tab so the hole needed to be opened up. About an inch was as far as I could expand the hole though and it still interfered with the threaded rod. The next thing to try was to put a slight bend into the rod and that seemed to work well enough. Using a 9 volt battery we swung the servo through its full range of motion and there was no binding.
We ended up with 20 degrees of nose down trim and about 25 nose up. Van’s says you should have 50-60 degrees of total trim tab movement, but all the forum says if you go electric you only get 40-45, so we called it a day and hung the elevator up in the rafter until they get mounted to the fuse.
With this step, the empennage is complete after 160.0 hrs of work. We will need to mount the fiberglass caps eventually, but we’re putting that off until we’re ready to do all of the fiberglass in the plane (wing tips, fairings, cowling, etc.).
-Paul
(Total Build Time: 171.5 hrs)