Brief Description: Began fabricating the rear spar for the horizontal
By Saturday afternoon our garage sale had gotten rid of enough stuff so I could clear off the work bench and get on with building an airplane. The lingering customers were curious about what I was doing and most gave me the deer in the headlights look when I told them.
The first process is to "break" the edges of the reinforcement bars (HS-609PP) so they will lay smooth inside the rear spar channel. The bench grinder and scotchbrite wheel made this pretty easy , but it did take some time.
I then clecoed the pieces together including the elevator hinge brackets and then drilled the holes to proper size. Everything was then taken apart and deburred. All parts were then marked for orientation and primed with NAPA 7220 Self Etching Primer after being cleaned with rubbing alcohol.
I then set my first rivet on the airplane as part of the (VA-146) bearing assembly. 1 down and 13,999 to go. Seriously, there are about 14,000 rivets on this airplane. It doesn't look like much work, but the drilling, deburring, and clecoing takes time.