Moving right along, I pull my horizontal stabilizer out of storage to begin getting everything ready to attach to the tailcone. I’m skipping around a little bit on this due to the fact that the Tailcone doesn’t have the aft top skin riveted on yet.
The first challenge is how you need to bolt the HS to your bench to ensure that the elevator horns have sufficient room to move. My benchtop doesn’t overhang so my first attempt wouldn’t let me move the elevators through their full motion. I ended up screwing a piece of plywood to my benchtop with a good 1.5-2 foot overhang. Even then, I had to have the HS overhang that by a bit to ensure that the elevator horns had sufficient travel.
I also got a bit excited and attached both elevators to the HS before I needed to. Not really a problem, but I’m getting really good at mounting / unmounting elevators to a HS. I didn’t even have the luxuary of using more specialized tools being discussed on the VAF forum. I’m sure those modified tools would have helped, but I did just fine with fingers and needle nose pliers.
I ended up getting quite lucky in hanging my elevators that I didn’t have to make adjustments to the bolts and my elevators swung freely and I had the appropriate distances between the HS and the elevator counterbalance. Only “mistake” I made was putting one of the rudder’s bolts in which didn’t fit between the elevator brackets. Again, a minor annoyance to take that longer / wider bolt out and find the correct one in the same bag.
Next steps are drilling the appropriate holes in the bellcrank for the pushrod. Getting to the bushing to drill the holes through the bearing did make me scratch my head a bit. The bushing doesn’t fit in the bearing, and the drill bit didn’t fit in the hole in the bushing. Reading the plans a few times, I figured out I needed to grind down the bushing to fit in the bearing, as well as drill out the bushing for the drill bit to fit. Using my bench grinder as well as my bench vise and cordless drill make quick work of that, and got the appropriate holes drilled.
Then I disassemble everything and put it all back on the shelf for a bit and start looking at fabricating the parts needed for the trim servo housing. Gotta get all those pieces fabricated and the pushrod cut to length so I can do one last primer session (my last of this year). Already looking at ordering the Wing kit in early November so that delivery should be early January.