On to the Left Elevator

Sunday 2nd Dec 7hrs 40min

Prepared the edges of all remaining right elevator parts. Dimpled the skin. Assembled Left Elevator skeleton and skin and match-drilled all parts. Cut and prepped the edges of skin stiffeners.

The manual contains plenty of fair warnings about the left elevator. They say that it is responsible for a very large proportion of support calls for the RV-9 kit. Suitably chastened by all this, I got the parts together and began.

I initially cut all the stiffeners to the standard length and did the filing at blunt (forward) end. This was to establish a fixed point from which to measure the length at which the short ones should be cut. Once the first of these short stiffeners was measured off, I decided to cut the whole lot in one go on the band saw (which has been having a quiet time of late). I probably should have taken care to line up the forward holes of all the stiffeners in my stack but I did not think of it and just used the forward end to allign them together. Anyway, the band saw went through them as if through butter and there was none of the 'chatter' and fuss I found when sawing such thin material one piece at a time. Naturally, I stayed well back from the cut line to leave plenty of safety margin and I tidied them up using my belt sander to remove material back to the exact length required. They turned out just fine and not aligning the forward holes does not seem to have caused any problem.


Match drilling them to the skin was essentially a repeat of the process for the right elevator except that securing the trailing edge of the skin took a little extra ingenuity. The problem is that the 'indent' where the trim tab goes means that most of the trailing edge is not near the edge of the bench where it can be secured (or else the rest of the trailing edge is overhanging the bench and you have nothing to drill into). I came up with the solution pictured here, using scrap timber placed on the bench so that it slightly overlaps the trailing edge and screwing this timber to the bench just beyond this overlap with the edge of the skin.



The instructions refer to dimpling the E615PP for #6 screws. I don't really understand this as I thought the nut plates would rule that out. I will have to look into this further but for now I just match drilled the holes for riveting the E-615PP to the skin. Incidentally, it is the vinyl that is wrinkled in this photo, not the skin itself.