1 Feb 05 - Attaching/Drilling the Elevators

Here's the plan for tonight: the alignment on the elevators isn't quite right yet - rechecking how much the rod bearings were in revealed that they all needed to be turned another turn or two. The plan is to take the elevators off (they're still on using the little temporary bolt-wanna-be nails that we made last time), and get the rod bearings in place. Then let's get the hole for the bolt drilled in each elevator, and start thinking about attaching them to the pushrods. That's the plan, anyway, let's see how we do.

This is important - it's a drill guide, and it goes though the bearing in the horizontal stabilizer, so you're sure to match drill the hole in the elevators in the right place.	After the rod end bearings were tightened down, we needed to be sure that this still has the required clearance - this one does, but the right one doesn't. Whoops. We'll have to fix that tomorrow.
It would have been a bad idea to drill the hole for the bolt that goes through the bearing (shown in the next picture) with just the temporary fasteners in there, as they have a smaller diameter than the bolts, so there's some wiggle room in there. Anyway, bolts are in.	And there's the hole drilled with the bolt through it - this is more complex than it looks, because you can only drill one side at a time. Put one side on, drill it, take that side off, put the other side on, drill that one, then put everything back together.
Just for giggles, let's put it on the fuselage. Looks cool!	This is Ted, the shop mascot (of sorts). He's usually scared off by any sort of noises, which means he's only willing to go into the shop when we aren't there. Tonight was the first night he ventured into the shop when activities were going on.

Well, we've got a plan for tomorrow - first, we need to file the horizontal stab so that the clearance between the stab and the right elevator tip is back in spec. Also, we've just started working on what the plans refer to as an "aluminum sandwich" so we can drill the holes in the elevator horns for the pushrod attachment. We'll get those holes drilled tomorrow. Also, there's an elevator stop that we need to fabricate, and we need to start thinking about getting the horizontal stab bolted to the fuselage.

I expect that list of stuff will keep us busy for the next few days. Hopefully, we're not too far from having the whole empennage attached to what's beginning to look more like an aircraft and less like a canoe.

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