May 19-20, 2024: Mary and I finished the final top-skin rivets to complete the tail cone riveting! That felt like a big accomplishment! It’s hard to reach those final rivets without climbing inside the fuselage, so I built a bed from wood blocks and plywood to avoid bending the bulkheads with my body weight. The final 80-or-so rivets on the top skin went easily. I was worried about the last two interior rivets that connect the forward bulkhead with the top-skin bulkhead, since you can only reach them with the double-offset rivet set, or a very long rivet set that I haven’t purchased. Any, Mary did a good job with the double-offset gun, and I was inside with the bucking bar, and they came out OK. Phew. Next is moving on to section 11 “Empennage Attach”. To start this, I got the horizontal stabilizer and elevators out of the basement and back into the garage. Unfortunately, while positioning the HS on a bench I whacked it into the tailcone and bent a couple flanges on the lower left forward section of the tailcone. (See photos below.). Fortunately I was able to massage the bent tabs back into place, and file out the tiny crack that was created between two tabs. A squeezer with two flat sets took out the bends. Luckily these tabs go inside the fuselage skin when it gets joined, so shouldn’t be visible. I realize that I was lucky here and need to be more careful while moving heavy parts around. This could have been worse, requiring a lot of repair work or even worse, replacing a fuselage skin. I don’t even want to think about a big setback like that! Joining the elevators to the horizontal stab is fun, and it’s cool to see how large this piece of the plane is! Fortunately, the elevators seem to fit nicely, but I needed to move the rod end bearings out one full turn (0.042”) from the nominal 13/16 spacing called out on page 11-02 of the plans, to avoid scraping the leading edge of the skin on the HS hinge brackets at full up deflection (25 - 30 degrees). This is a common issue. I don’t know if one full-turn is acceptable, so will contact Van’s about this. Probably I can massage the leading edge bends to prevent the rubbing, but I’d rather not if I can just move the rod ends out one full turn of the screw. Next up is drilling holes in the elevator control horns for the center hinge, and also drilling holes for the elevator pitch control. It seems like people commonly screw up this step and required welding repairs to the control horn, so I’m going to proceed slowly!

Time spent: 10hr