Sunday, July 4, 2010

Mission Accomplished





I've accomplished the task of finishing the Stabilator over the weekend. Yay! 4th of July can begin now...
The final riveting of the splice plate and the aft skins went easy and without any incident. You might see that I broke the edge of the skins where they were supposed to get riveted. I was afraid that the force of the rivet would pull the skin up a bit, creating a sharp edge and a nasty look. The tool I have for that from Avery is not that easy to use. You have to take extra care to guide it cleanly along the edge as it tends to run into the skin which creates pretty ugly bends that are hard to fix. This will cause a few problems when I use this one on the tail cone skins, I can already see that.
The other quirk with it is that it is very hard to fine adjust as a little turn on the screw has a very large effect. Oh well, I'll just have to live with it I guess. But if you read this and haven't bought one yet, you might want to try the one from Cleveland Tools as it can't be worse than this one here.
The last steps were the assembly of the control horn and mounting the weights on the Counterbalance Arm. That went well, too although I nicked the powder coating in my vise a bit and so I gave it a little rattle can primer on these spots to keep the steel from rusting.
That was it! Final assembly is supposed to happen later and now I'm heading towards the tail cone.
55 hours went into the Stabilator. This sums up to 116.5 total so far.

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