Seems like a long time coming. There has been so much going on lately that progress had slowed a little bit, but I kept on plugging away and tonight I finished the HS!

It was a productive weekend!

Saturday I spend the day getting things done around the house. Knocking out a long honey-do list. In the afternoon, I was able to prep and prime the remaining HS parts. There are so many pieces it took 3 solid hours to prep and prime.

I have the B2VT coming up on June 11th, so I got what will probably be my last long training ride on Sunday. I was able to knock out 80 solo miles. I had planned to work a bit on the plane afterwards, but was pretty wiped. So I decided to nix that idea.

Today I was able to spend a bunch of time starting the final assembly and made good progress.

I was able to rivet together the stringers and stringer web, the basic skeleton to the front spar, the nose ribs to the skins, the front spar to the nose ribs, and started riveting the skins to the front spar. A couple of pictures of today’s progress.

Spring and Summer start filling up the schedule and life starts getting in the way a little bit.

I’m doing a crazy bicycle ride on June 11th that is 134 miles long and 8000′ of climbing. I’ve been spending as much time as I can training for that, which has taken up several hours each weekend. Also last weekend we had lots of people over the house to celebrate Greek Easter. So between that, and my drain plug in my compressor failing, yet again… I didn’t get much done the last couple of weekends. Additionally, we’ll be away 2 weekends in May.

My compressor is only about 2 years old, and the original drain plug bolt snapped in half right at the hole that’s drilled through it.

Last weekend after draining the tank and starting it back up again, air was leaking out of the drain still. After investigating and unintentionally unscrewing the bolt all the way out of the drain plug (that’s not supposed to happen) and having the bolt shoot out of the drain in a big burst of air… I found that there is no o-ring present anymore which is letting air leak by. So I went out and bought a brass elbow, extension rod, and a ball valve shutoff to make draining the tank easier to get to, and a more reliable mechanism.

I debated putting an automatic drain i, but I’m also having thoughts of upgrading to a 60 gallon 2-stage compressor too. So that will wait.

 I’ve spent what time I’ve had working on getting the nose ribs and inspar ribs all match drilled to the front spar and fabricating cradles to hold the assembly for final drilling and riveting.  I decided to try straps for the cradles instead of making them rigid after seeing what Jason Ellis did. The cradle doesn’t influence the shape at all, it’s simply a method to hold things up while working on the HS. The straps also allow a little bit of movement, if needed.

A picture of the Horizontal Stabilizer skeleton, with all the nose ribs and in-spar ribs attached.

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Mostly just posting some pictures from some Horizontal Stabilizer progress. I’ve finished initial riveting of the front spar, doubler plate, and attach brackets.

I’m now working on the tedious task of deburring the in-spar ribs and nose ribs. I really hate deburring ribs. There are so many nooks and crannies to deburr. I suppose though that if I had to make that part from scratch, that it would take a lot longer than the deburring I’m doing.

Also, while riveting the front spar, I managed to trip over my air line and pull my squeezer off of the bench onto the floor. The result was the trigger pin jammed in the on position…

  I emailed Isham, my tool vendor, and he got back to me almost immediately. It ended up being a simple fix. I removed the air swivel input, spring, and pushed the trigger pin out. Ran a reamer though the hole to get rid of any oblonging, and oiled the trigger pin back up and re-assembled. Seemed to fix the issue, and was able to use the squeezer to finish up the spar.

Was bound to happen sooner or later. Friday night I started fabricating the Spar attachment brackets from a piece of Aluminum Angle.

The first one (left one shown here) came out fine. It seemed to take about an hour to do one of these to be accurate. Today I started out making the right one, which is basically the same, but flipped in orientation. The first mistake was cutting the “mitered” edge which starts from a width of 1 21/32″ in the front to 1 1/2″ in the rear before I had cut the bottom leg down to 1″. I ended up with a final width only 2/32″ wider in the front compared to the rear….  Second mistake happened while cutting the other leg down to 2 3/8″. I didn’t get a straight cut, and ended up with a crooked edge. At that point, I decided to scrap that part and seeing I didn’t have enough angle left to make another attempt, I’ll need to order a new one. A 12″ long piece is $9, so not too terrible.

The stock aluminum angle to make these parts from:

  Here is the good one on the left and messed up one on the right 

   
 
I was then able to get the forward spar and spar caps cut, deburred and drilled. I also deburred the spar doubler before calling it a day. 

   
 
Also the VHB tape I got on return from Amazon did the same thing as last time. So I’ve returned those rolls and ordered some from Vans. Hoping that will work so I can finish up the rudder that is on hold at the moment. 

So while I wait for my replacement roll of 3M VHB tape from Amazon, which actually came today, and at first look, seems to behave better than the first roll I got…. I riveted together the rear spar, stiffener, and hinge brackets of the Horizontal Stabilizer. I was also able to assemble and rivet together the inboard hinge bracket and bearing assembly. Some pictures of the progress…