N45HX

We’re still waiting on bits to wire the rudder trim, so we started deburring parts for the horizontal stabilizer.

Randy spent a long time with spar doublers.   Now he knows the pain.

 

I cut the two brackets that hold the horizontal stabilizer on, out of some aluminum angle.  The shape is quite difficult.   I wound up 1/32″ short.  It’s okay, I only spent several hours on them.  There are some pre-made ones on the internet for $25.  I’m just getting those.

 

I did start on the spar caps.  Parts for the horizontal stabilizer are long.  The horizontal stabilizer is 14 feet.  It’s starting to become more obvious that this is a big airplane.  I finished 2 of them, 4 more to do:

 

 

Berck: 6 hours, Randy: 6 hours.

A little less than I would have liked, but we’re still doing very well.  We finished the day with the rudder stiffeners all riveted to the skins:

 

Much of the day was deburring and dimpling.  Randy spent a long time practicing with the cleveland edge forming tool to use on the trailing edge of the rudder on scrap pieces.  When it came time to use it, I’d foiled his plan by dimpling the trailing edge holes already. Whoops.

The next step is the dreaded rudder trailing edge, about which there is much internet discussion.  One of the suggestions is to use an angle iron to help rivet everything straight, and I think we may do that.

We were sure to go ahead and get the proseal so we could get to that step this weekend, but that was before Randy pointed out that we really should run the wiring for the rudder trim with anti-vibration clips inside the rudder *before* we close up the rudder.   So we’ll order some wire and clips on Monday.

Lesson relearned today: You might do a beautiful job of backriveting the skins, but it works better if you actually rivet the stiffeners to the skins.  Just putting a rivet through the skin is fairly pointless.

Inexplicable lesson learned today: Back-riveting stiffeners works much better when the flange is to my right.  With the flange to my left, the rivets tend to fold.  I cannot explain this phenomenon, but I’ll try to remember to do this way in the future.

I’ll either be taking the weeknights off this week, or start deburring the horizontal stabilizer parts since I can’t really go any further on the rudder right now.

Berck: 8 hours, Randy: 7 hours, Jonah: 4 hours.