Elevator balancing is apparently important to maintaining a margin against flutter at high speeds. The RV-14 plans don’t really address this, and they just say to trim the weights to a certain size and install them. I asked Van’s tech support for more details, and they said each elevator should be individually balanced. So, I trimmed the weights (actually had to melt and pour lead back onto one of them) to get each elevator close to balanced, and just slightly nose heavy (between 50 and 100 grams too much weight), since adding paint will tend to make the tail heavy. After painting, if the elevator is still nose-heavy, it can be balanced by drilling holes in the exposed inner weight. But if the elevator is tail heavy, weight needs to be added. To accommodate this option, I added nutplates for AN3 bolts(recommended by Paul Mantegna) so that some number of 2” diameter steel fender washers can be installed if necessary, with the elevator tip fairings installed.

Time spent: 2hr 30min