01 Jan 11 A year’s dust ain’t so bad

After nearly a year of collecting dust, my plane is finally back under construction. I took a few weeks off work over the holidays with the intention of building as much as possible.  Christmas and family obligations ate a few days, but I was able to spend almost 10 days truckin along in the garage.

First step was to clean up the shop.  Turns out a year of dust isn’t too bad.  But then figuring out what I needed to start working on took a while.  I remembered being extremely frustrated with the trim tab bends and elevator tab bends.  Both the trim tab and left elevator have these little tabs you have to bend over to seal the sides back to the trailing edge.  For some reason bending aluminum is something I’m nearly incapable of.

This might look ok, but did not end well (the tab thats bending ended up dragging into the lower tab pretty badly):

A few hours reading other build logs I came to the realization that I’m far from alone in this, and that many people have cut the tabs off the elevator and fabricated some simple mini-rib to rivet into the gap.  Feeling much better about my cut off tabs on the elevator I moved on to cleaning up and riveting the elevator.

A year ago fall I had ordered a replacement trim tab.  I had my dad come out with the intention of having him help bend the tabs.  In explaining the job at hand, I showed him the old trim tab I was going to replace.  He asked what was wrong with it, and I couldn’t really remember.  Must have been totally broken I  was sure.  After some inspection we concluded that it was just fine.  He helped make a new jig to bend the tabs and I was in business.  Really he gets credit for that entirely!

I also wrestled with rolling the leading edges of my elevators. The steel horn makes rolling the edge a real pain in the ass.  I cut my rolling pipe in bits so I could roll each section without hitting the horn.  We’ll see how that goes — I didn’t quite get to finish this yet, and I will the next time i’m in the shop.  I got carried away building wing jigs and starting on the wings, but that’s for another post.

Here you can see how it didn’t quite end up rolled enough. To be fixed:

The last step is to close up the trim tab.  For some reason (ie i misdrilled) the geometry on my trim tab hinge won’t allow me to mount the tab in perfect alignment of the elevator’s trailing edge.  Van’s suggests this is highly important for the plane to fly true.  I have a replacement hinge clamped in place ready to be drilled.  I will then need to learn how to attache and safety wire the hinge, and that’s that!