Empennage

The weather was terrible today. Started out with freezing rain that progressed to sleet. It was about 25 degrees when I got up and fell to 19 as the day went along. I got in the garage and got busy with the RV and was glad to have my son Jim at home helping me out today. We finished up the riveting of the E-701-L and E-713 to the understructure. With that done we moved on and riveted the E-606PP to E-701-L on the bottom flange only. You have to leave to top flange unriveted at this point for the installation of the trim tab hinge. Then I finished attaching the E-714 counterweight.

We moved along to the Trim Tab at this point. First thing was to finish the bend of the trailing edge of the E-619-1-020 trim tab skin. I used the bending tool that I had fabricated earlier to accomplish this. It was the easy part. Next step was to fabricate a set of bending blocks from wood like I did on the elevator tabs so I could bend the tabs on each end of the trim tab. I had to do both the inboard and outboard sides. I'm glad Jim was here to help as it is a lot harder than it sounds.

The next step was to cleco the E-607PP to the inside bottom surface of E-619-1-020. Then I took E-717 and E-718 and clamped them together and ran a clevis pin through the clevis pin attach hole for alignment. Then I cleco'ed E-717 to the trim tab skin. There were only three holes pre-drilled so I used the holes in E-718 as a guide and match drilled E-718 and E-717 to E-619-1-020 and E-607PP.

E-717 and E-718 has a lot of extra aluminum that has to be removed so I took them off the trim tab skin and made them to the correct size by trimming with the shears and finishing up with the Scotch Brite wheel.

5 Hours

Total hours on project = 156