Brief Description: Finished the horizontal stabilizer!
Today was another milestone day. Colten helped for over two hours and we completed the horizontal stabilizer, our first major component is done! He was a big help and bucked pretty much all of the rivets we drove today. His smaller hands fit inside the structure much easier than mine and the tungstun bucking bar made the job easy for him. He did a great job, better than I expected. Colten seemed to really enjoy the process and stuck with me until we had the piece completed.
I am happy with how it turned out and had Diane take a picture of me with my two helpers and the finished product. It is about eight feet long without the fiberglass tips that I will install when the rest of the tail pieces are complete. It feels good to have some new "artwork" that will hang in the bar area of my house soon for storage. I have a lot of airplane pictures and stuff in there already, so the tail components will fit right in. Diane shook her head when I said I planned to hang the wings from the ceiling of the bar when they are done. She pretty much thinks I am nuts which is close to the truth. On to the next component, the vertical stabilizer.
Don stopped by this evening and checked out the HS. He didn't say that he wouldn't fly in an airplane it was a part of, so I took that as a good sign. It is done right and will last a long time.
