Today I worked on the right elevator skeleton. Here it is all assembled and drilled. I still have to bend the skin to form the trailing edge, but I'm waiting on that until my dimpler arrives (it ships Monday). The instructions say to have the stiffeners riveted on before bending the edge, so that's why it's delayed. I'm not sure if that's really necessary, though, so I'll have to give it some thought and maybe I'll do that tomorrow if I think it'll be OK without the stiffeners.
It was then all disassembled for deburring and dimpling prior to being put in my new 'to be primed' pile. Here's where E-709 attaches to E-702. The elevator horn fits over the top of these rivets, so they have to be flush rivets, and the instructions specify machine countersinking rather than dimpling. I'm not really sure why, but I'll just have to trust them. The microstop cage doesn't fit on the holes near the flanges, so I had to just put the countersink bit in the drill press and go slowly and carefully. I decided to use that method for all 4 holes since I was already at the drill press. It worked out quite well. The spar is just thick enough to get a good countersink in there wihtout enlarging the holes. I'm sure it wouldn't have turned out this good had I just used the hand drill and microstop cage...
It worked so well I decided to go ahead and do it to one hole in the counterweight skin. There is a point where 4 surfaces mate with 1 rivet (on each side). I figured that dimpling all 4 would be rediculous and probably wouldn't turn out very good. So I will dimple the elevator skin, and as you can see here I machine countersunk the counterweight skin, and the spar and flange below will remaing flat (spar pictured).
So after a long Saturday of plane work (And another trip to Lowes), I have a brand new 'to be primed' pile. Actually this is just all the elevator parts posing for the picture. The lead counterweight will not be primed (but I did have at it with the vixen file to remove excess as shown in the drawing), and the counterweight skin won't be either. And the horn will be touched up with rustoleum primer, so the 'to be primed' pile is really just the aluminum items on the right...
