26/08/2007 - More work on Rudder skeleton

Its been a dreadful week at work; not the worst I have known by a long stretch; but the worst for a while.  The reason for telling you that is that I have done nothing on the aircraft for days !!! not good at all.

So with my son having excelled himself with his GCSE results and being thoroughly proud of him, we spent Saturday together having fun.

So on Sunday it was time to get back in the garage.  I started work on the counterbalance area of the rudder.  A lot of holes for rivets there; looks fiddly.  I also cut the rudder bottom glass fibre attach strips from a long piece of aluminium provided by vans.

I took things as far as I could before I needed the skins back from being primed ready for the stiffeners.  So I set the rudder aside for the time being.

26/08/2007 - Started the Elevators

So now its on with what I can do on the elevators and specifically the right elevator first.  The left elevator has the trim tab in it and so is left to last, and the  manual says 'be careful' so I am not going anywhere near it for a bit !

Anyway the first part covers stiffeners for the left and right elevator....and there are plenty of them I can tell you.  I have blisters where the snips rub.

The stiffeners come something like this

First part is cutting with the snips to make the basic shape

Then they are filed, corners rounded and smoothed on the scotchbrite wheel, so they look like this

One set for the right hand elevator all marked ready for drilling