Nov 16 - 28, 2023: Horizontal Stabilizer completed! We spent the last two weeks on the more “fun” part of the HS, which is seeing it all come together when riveting the skin onto the skeleton, and then “closing it out” by riveting the rear spar onto the ribs inside the skin. It comes together pretty quickly after all the deburring, priming and dimpling is done, and you get a good sense of accomplishement. However, as you get near completion, there are plenty of tricky rivets, and it is possible to create a huge setback or destroy the whole assembly if the rivet gun gets loose and punches a hole in a rib or spar or skin or something. I’m always feeling that stress near then end, because all the prior hours of work are at risk! There are plenty of people in the Van’s forums who have built multiple rudders (for example) because the first didn’t turn out right. We haven’t had that happen yet, but I hope I’m not jinxing it. I always feel like I’m one stupid mistake away from scrapping the last 100 hours of work! Mary helped a lot with deburring and dimpling. And Mary and I got into a good rhythm with skin riveting. She operates the rivet gun, and I hold the bucking bar inside the skin. It goes pretty fast once the rhythm is established! I invite Paul (EAA Tech Counselor) and Kacy over to inspect the parts before I “close them out”, which makes inspection difficult or impossible. Paul’s usual feedback to me: Prime less! Squeeze some of these rivets more! I’m starting to get calibrated on what he wants to see, finally. The last 10 rivets, attaching the nose ribs to the front spar, were challenging. No squeezer will fit in there, so a rivet gun is required, with “double offset” rivet set. One slip of the gun off the rivet and you could wreck the whole spar, which would mean starting over from scratch on the entire HS. And the bucking bar is at a weird angle, so hard to hold. I invited Paul and Kacy over to help with these. Kacy ran the gun while I held the bucking bar. We had to keep turning up the pressure on the gun, and the rivets bucked VERY gradually. Nerve-wracking, but we got it done with no collateral damage! Next up is the elevator!

Time spent: 32hr