Brief Description: left elevator leading edge bend
Since it's time to bend the leading edge, and I have the left elevator here in front of me - the left elevator is the first victim. I used a 1/2" metal pipe (c-clamped to the workbench) to bend the rudder leading edge, and it was very easy to bend with a pipe wrench for the actual bending. The problem was, it put too small of a radius on the leading edge bend. So for the left elevator leading edge I had some 3/4" PVC laying around - and the thinking was that the bend radius would be slightly larger...and it was. So that was better - however, now there was too much movement of the elevator during the actual bending and I was getting "c-clamp" interference. To remedy this, I disconnected the PVC from the workbench - removing the c-clamps and bent it "loose" without being clamped to the bench. This worked pretty well - better than I expected. The whole process still took me longer than I thought it should to get the bends to line up right and it took a lot of "massaging" to get the middle section right. I think on the right elevator, I will bend one section at a time instead of the whole leading edge - starting with the outboard section first. I will see if this works better...
