Brief Description: Built hinges and drilled and cleaned up spars
Finished building hinges for Rudder and Elevators. Also drilled to 3/32 inch and cleaned up the edges on the empenage HS and VS spars. Sonex uses a LASER or plasma device to mark the thick spars for drilling. The holes they make are pin-holes on one side of the spar and much larger blown out holes on the other side with a crater of melted aluminum around the blown out hole. Would be nice if Sonex would drill or use a water jet for these hole, would save a lot of time for the builder and ensure the final holes are in the correct location rather than having the builder drill the intial holes using the pin holes as a guide.
The empennage spars need to be precisely bent and the thickness of these spars are .187 which will be difficult to bend. I decided to order a 1 ton arbor press to help me bend these parts. Will also use 1 inch pipe nipples to get the 1/2 radius specified. The arbor press was fairly inexpensive, $55 but the shipping cost was another $30. Never thought I would need an arbor press in my tool collection, hopefully I will be able to use it more than a couple times during the build.
