Brief Description: Rolled and riveted elevator leading edges
Well I finally made the bends on the L/R elevator leading edges. I was laid up from surgery on my elbow and did not have the strength to do the bend, but I have made it through my physical therapy and also had the help of my friend Bob. I did the rudder by myself but it is definitely better to have help. I bent the right side first thinking if I screwed that up it would be less complicated to build a new one since it does not have the trim tab. I learned a lot from the first one which is typical in the build process so the bend on the left side came out much better. On the right I have a little puckering between a couple of rivets which you can see from the picture. I may add a few extra rivets to take care of this, I am not sure it is a real issue; I want to run this by some builder before I add any rivets. The left side is near perfect no puckering. What I learned was, even though Van’s says to use a ¾ to 1” pipe to make the roll, if you do the initial roll with a ½” pipe you avoid the puckering. My puckering is caused by the lower tab pushing up on the top tap. I did not bend the right side with the ½” pipe so I tried to go back and do it but this only helped a little, a little work with the hand seamer helped some more but not enough to take out all of the pucker.
To me the best practice is to roll just the first bit with the ½” pipe then roll more with the ¾” pipe. The roll with the smaller pipe I found gives a nice shape so that once joined the two pieces fit together better. One thing I missed at first in the instruction is that the pipe is used to make the initial roll but you must complete the shape by hand. The radius decreases as you get to the wider end of the control surface. Once rolled getting the first cleco in can be difficult, duct taping it so that it is close helps. The tail parts are in storage now in my “Man Cave”. You can see the elevators on the wall by the deer and the rudder a VS above the book shelf.
