Just a quick tip... don't forget to tape off that portion of the elevator tip skin that will be visable if you are corrosion-proofing the inside of your aircraft.
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We then coutersunk the left elevator trim tab spar, where it connects with the outward ribs, with the drill press. We still backed it up with another .032 scrap piece with a pilot drilled so the countersinking bit would not chatter.
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October 19th, 2005
Finally, the trim tab is complete!
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Even though Van's says the trim tab and left elevator is the most popular part that is often screwed-up while building the tail, we did remarkably well! Here you can see the primitive method of bending the end worked pretty well. Also, you can tell we decided on an electric trim tab (see hinge detail).
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Next we lined the trim tab up, and marked it out to drill the piano hinge to the elevator. There was no easy way to clamp it in place, so marking it out seemed like the best thing to do here.
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After attaching the piano hinge to the elevator, we put the trim tab back in place to see if we kept alignment. We did pretty darn good! Next we slightly bend the bottom forward flange so it clears the flange on the elevator when deflected. Van's doesn't provide a lot of guidance here, but we discover is doesn't need to be bent all that much and it can be done by hand.
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Then we finish rolling the leading edge of the left elevator. We have really come to hate this process. It takes a lot of patience and muscle work. I hope we don't have to do this on the wings (we don't think we will anyway).
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October 21st, 2005
The fun part starts! fitting all the pieces together! Here is the horizontal and finished elevators finally together. Next we trim the horizontal where the elevator wrap up around the outboard edges. We used a dremmel tool with a cutter for this process. The hand-nibblers nor the shears were not good options, and the dremmel did an excellent job!
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