Brief Description: Nutplate installed on elevator horn inspection hol
We finished riveting the nutplates to the elevator horn inspection holes today. We used the hand squeezer, pneumatic squeezer, and the rivet gun and bucking bar. It was difficult because we had already installed the horizontal stabilizer with the elevator attached. This caused the inability to reach all the nutplates using any one rivet tool. Very annoying!
I crawled into the tailcone to connect the elevator trim wires by connecting two D-sub9 connectors that I had already wired. The aft Dsub still needed the wired pins inserted and the plastic shell put on. The forward Dsub connector was zip tied to an L bracket that I had glued onto the floor of the tailcone close to the bulkhead. All I had to do was connect the aft connector to the forward connector. After making the connection we tried running the elevator trim tab by using the trim (coolie hats) switches on the Infinity grips. It did not drive the trim tab, so I diconnected the connectors and removed the shells from the aft Dsub. I pluged just the naked Dsub into the forward connector and it worked, which told me that the male and female pins had not mated. I filed down the connector screws enough to pull the connectors together with the shells back in place and it worked. The screws on both connectors had butted together inside the standoffs between the connectors before the pins had mated. The shortened screws prevented them from butting in the standoff and allowed the pins to mate. What a pain!! My 20 minute job had taken 1 1/2 hours. And it would have taken longer if Charlotte had not been there to hand me tools through the empennage bulkhead holes.
Using the hand squeezer to rivets some of the nutplates.
The inspection plate attached.
I'm inserting the wired pins into the Dsub connector.
