And so the building begins...

29 May 2011   buildlog   firsts   horizontal-stabilizer   assembly

After much study over the past several months, and a bit of just setting parts together in various spots to see how they fit together, the build process has finally started. Step one in section 6 starts with assembling the forward spar of the horizontal stabilizer, then match drilling all the punched holes.

       

Next up, fabricate some attach angles. These two parts are supplied as a piece of angle that has to be cut down to size. These parts do have a bit of a complex shape to them, so it took some thinking to come up with a plan for manufacturing them. I ended up cutting them to rough length on my mitre saw to get the angle right. The width of both pieces is being cut with the dremel to rough size. Once these are cut close to their final size, the remainder of the work will be done on the grinder, slowly creeping up to the final sizes. I must admit that reading other builders accounts of this process had left me a little bit nervous about it, but so far they have not been any real issue.

         

While waiting for one of the attach angles to cool from a round at the grinder, and for the dremel’s battery to charge, I went ahead and assembled and match drilled the rear spar.

Later, I continued working on the attach brackets. I’ve got one of the pretty well finished on the shaping, though I did end up making it about 1/16” wide. It should be fine though. There’s a bit of room available, as long as I do the hole layout properly anyway.

   

Its shiny and nice!

I still have a bit of work to do on the other bracket. It’s about 1/8” too wide right now - a bit too much too big. Better too big than too small though.

Other than just being the first work done on actual airplane parts, there isn’t anything too exciting. Nothing that really looks like airplane parts yet - unless you squint just right….


Build hours status

Entry Type Hours this session Total hours to date
Total hours 2.5 4.5
Parts worked on
 horizontal stabilizer 2.5 2.5
Work Types
 assembly 1 1
 fabrication 1.5 1.5
Builders
 nitehawk 2.5 4.5