DATE: 12-12-2024 – TIME 08:42 – 5:07 ~ 7:00
We had completed most of page 3 yesterday but still needed to complete steps 6 through 12 which is the process of drilling the pushrod bolt hole through each of the elevator horns. This required making a drilling block to help keep things aligned.
We initially used gorilla tape to secure the elevators in the trail position but then change to a couple of clamps. Not sure if that will cause problems but it definitely held the elevators more securely.
These snapshots depict the process of setting up and drilling the bolt hole but it’s hard to see much because of the location of the cameras and the person working. I think without a forehead attached sports camera it would be impossible to get better shots, but you can at least take a look.
There is nothing particularly difficult to do here except that handling the hinge bolts, AN3 and AN4, is much easier with one of those flat wrenches that has a ratchet at one end and open at the other. The AN4 bolt on the centre bearing is particularly onerous because the wrench rotation is severely limited by proximity to the horn.
Anyway, removing and attaching the elevators a number of times you pretty quickly get much better at handling the bolts.
At the end of this process the elevators are detached, again, from the horizontal stabilizer and you can then unscrew the stabilizer from the bench and turn it around to work on the front spar. You need to final drill the VS-1016, 4 holes, to the HS-1002 front spar and it is much easier if you have turned the horizontal stabilizer around.
Step 2 on page 11-4 is the fabrication of the 4 shims that will go beneath the HS-1008 and between the HS-1008 and the top of the aft deck F-1014. These shims are shaped like the HS-1008. I initially cut “rectangular” pieces out of the AB4 piece with my trusty $300 bandsaw from Harbor Freight, then marked the angle for the one side and used my $69 bench belt and disk sander from Harbor Freight to sand off the side to the correct shape. I also used the same sander to radius the corners and then used my medium 3M wheel to deburr all the edges.
We did not have any double sided carpet tape but I did have a lot of 3M VHB (very high bond) transfer tape left over from assembling all the trailing edges so I used that to glue the shims together in pairs, one for the left HS-1008 and one for the right.
If you are going to follow a similar process make sure you use gloves, the aluminum bar gets hot when you are sanding off all that material.
So far so good. The next step is to reorganize the shop a bit again and then place the horizontal stabilizer onto the tailcone !