Category: Elevator

Match Drilling, disassembly of the second elevator. Deburring all the elevator parts in prep for priming.

As other have said before, you never have enough clecos.   The other thing to note is that I’m using the reamer vs a Jobber drill.  Not sure if this is making any real difference or not, but the hope is that it creates a better hole with less burr.

More match drilling and then disassembly of the elevator parts in prep for priming.

I started to do my initial assembly of the Elevators.  First thing was figuring out which way to bend the skins for the R and Left elevators.  I ended up messing up my bend on the first one and decided just to use the Rivet gun to pound the skin flat and try again with some better wooden blocks.  You can totally see that the skin isn’t perfect, but I have long since decided that this is not really going to be a “show plane”.  I’ll most likely put some filler or micro to clean up the skin a bit prior to painting.  No Biggie.

Also not sure if you can really catch it, but when I was attaching and match drilling the elevator horn, I had it rotated the wrong way.  Again, not the end of the world, and I made sure that I had everything correct for final assembly.

Once again got some help from the girls while I was working and continued to make progress.  So far, things are pretty straightforward based on past experience.

Beginning to assemble the elevators.  The first few steps are cutting and cleaning up a number of the ribs and other small parts.  I found my belt sander to be perfect for getting the separated rib parts down to the correct size.  This did leave a bit of a burr that was then cleaned up on the ScotchBrite wheel.  I assembled the ribs and match drilled them.  I also cut and cleaned up the shear clips as well as assemble the Elevator tip rib assemblies.

Honestly this is what I consider the “fun stuff”.  Take basic materials and cut, assemble, match drill, and begin to put the parts together.