Left Elevator is Done! – Tail kit is Done! March 12th, 2007
The only thing left to do in the left elevator was to roll the leading edges. I enlisted Fabiola’s help, and we finally got it done today. This rolling business is probably the hardest task so far. It’s very hard to have these things come out looking good. Everyone says you can’t really see them once the elevators are mounted, so we’ll see.
To roll the edges, we used a 1″ diameter pipe, duct-taped to the skin. Fabiola would hold the skin while I used two vice-grips to roll the pipe and skin. This is really easy for the first skin, but when it the time comes to roll the skin on the other side, the 1″ pipe won’t fit without hitting the skin you’ve just rolled. I ended up using a plastic sprinkler pipe for the first section and this worked out very well. For the middle section, the pipe wasn’t long enough, so I used some PVC pipe. BAD IDEA. The duct tape came loose in the middle of the pipe (not sure if it was because it was PVC, or something else), resulting in a skin which was perfectly bend at the edges, with a nasty ‘wave’ in the middle. After a lot of cussing and thinking, we decided to use more rivets in the center section. This made it look better.
Here’s the finished elevator:
At this point, there are only a few tasks remaining in the tail. I am going to hold off on these until later in the build process:
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Mount, match, and drill the elevators to the horizontal stabilizer
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Drill some holes in the lead counterweights to balance the elevators
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Attach wires to the electric trim, as well as trimming out some of the material in the elevator which may interfere with the trim arm.
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Attach the fiberglass tips.
Other than that, the tail kit is done! ..just in time too, ‘cuz the wings just showed up!