We left off last time with elevator stiffeners completed and ready to rivet. Now, the elevator skins have been drilled, dimpled, deburred and primed. The stiffeners have beed attached, trim servo/hatch/mounting plate are finished, and the skins have been bent. The biggest lesson I learned during this phase was to SLOW DOWN! I ended up having to replace both the elevator skins with new ones, mainly from placing artificial deadlines on myself and trying to go too fast when i was WAY too tired. $165 mistake if you include shipping, but lesson learned- on with the show. ;)
Here, we see the skin stiffeners being test-fit to the right-hand skin. All parts are ready for riveting.
The stiffeners are then back-riveted in place, same as with the rudder. Shop heads turned out nice.
Since I chose the electric trim option, the next step is to get the trim mounting plates and servo installed. Here's the Ray Allen servo.
The servo gets match-drilled to this hatch...
Then the hatch gets screwed to this plate (notice the nutplates attached here). The plate is riveted to the left-hand elevator skin, and serves double duty by also acting as a stiffener for the skin.
This photo shows me using two cleco-clamps to hold a servo-mount for drilling. Six holes in all were drilled, three for each mount. Then the mounts were riveted to the hatch, and the servo attached with 4 screws and nylon locknuts. In order to avoid the servo-to-mount spacing issues that some builders have documented, I used shorter AN426AD3-3 rivets in the 2 rearmost holes. This gave me just enough clearance, and the shop heads were still within spec.
Here's a shot of the completed servo assembly, attached to the skin and ready to go.
Another pic of the servo, and a view of how the mounting plate looks from the outside.
And here's how the hatch looks when installed. The photo looks ugly; it's much prettier in person :)
The last task that I'll document in this section is the bending of the skins, using my home-made bending brake. High-tech stuff involving 2 pieces of wood and a few door hinges. No pics of the bent skins, but everything went well.
