1.6 Hours -
I’ve spent 21.7 hours on the horizontal stabilizer so far. Tonight, I almost feel like I’m back to square one. At least that’s what the pile of parts on my work bench makes it look like. By the end of the night, I had to completely disassemble the entire horizontal stabilizer.
Back to square one...a pile of parts on the workbench!
In all honestly, I’m happy with my progress so far. I’m now done with what I’m calling the preparation phase of the horizontal stabilizer. All of the parts have been match drilled, and all that is left is to deburr, dimple, prime and rivet. OK, all of that will probably take just as long as the preparation phase!
My work tonight consisted of completing the match drilling of the right HS skin to the frame. Once that was done, I removed the skin (taking out all of those clecoes is a real pain), and drilled the outboard holes of HS-710 and HS-714.
The right horizontal stabilizer completely match-drilled and ready for disassembly.
The last six holes to drill in the horizontal stabilizer (for now).
I’ve elected to go with manual trim. At some point in the construction, you have to drill a 5/8 inch hole in the left HS front spar to accommodate the trim cable. Some people wait to drill this until the HS is on the fuselage, but I decided to drill it now, before priming. To do this, I measured the location according to the plans, marked it with a center punch, drilled a #30 pilot hole, enlarged the hole to 1/2 inch with a uni-bit, and then expanded the hole to 5/8 with a tapered grinder mounted in my drill. I’m happy with the results.
A 5/8 inch hole drilled in the left, front HS-spar will be used later on to route the manual trim cable.
Finally, I decided to take my first shot at priming by testing my system on two small parts. I’m going to spend as little time as possible on priming. I don’t want to start a priming war, but I feel that etching, alodining, and then priming is way too much when the majority of the parts are alclad. So, I’m just going to clean the parts with MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) and then spray them with NAPA 7220 self-etching primer from a rattle can. Only mating surfaces and non-alclad parts will be primed. Of course, this may all change tomorrow if I’m not happy with my priming test run on HS-710 and HS-714.
Form priming, I'm cleaning parts with MEK and then using NAPA 7220 rattle can primer.
My first attempt at priming. I decided to start with a couple of small parts to see how well my system works.
