With help from my lovely assistant Colleen, the horizontal stabilizer is complete! Just under 50 hours total construction time for this part. It was a pretty straight forward thing to finish riveting the ribs and then riveting the rear spar.
I did have to drill out one of the rivets on the rear spar because I was going a bit too fast with the squeezer. I used the drill bit that Mike gave me that’s a size #42, which is just a bit smaller than the diameter of the rivet. This helps you from embiggening the hole when you drill out the rivet. And this was almost a perfect rivet removal. I was able to center the bit perfectly in the rivet, and not touch the aluminum surrounding the rivet with the bit. I said almost, because I managed to dig the jaws of the chuck into the skin. AGAIN! GRRRR!!! So, more bondo! Pretty minor in the scheme of things!
So now I need to figure out where to store this thing until it’s time for final assembly of the entire plane. This thing is big. I can’t even stand it up vertically in my garage! I’m thinking the wall space above my bench is going to work nicely.
Also, tonight was a beautiful night, and while I was out in the front yard with the dog, I snapped a few twilight shots of the airplane factory all lit up.
For tonight’s video, I paused the recording when Colleen got home so I could talk to her, but I forgot to restart it until about 20-some minutes after I started working again. Oops. Well, it was just me riveting… which is something you’ve seen before!
Yet another milestone reached! Good job on only botching a few of rivets so far.
Glad to see your “assistant” is back at it with you. 🙂
Thanks for sharing what the homestead looks like from the outside; I figured it was an attached garage versus unattached.
I guess the tailcone is the next part of the assembly?