Today I met Mike at the hangar as he had agreed to give me a hand with the trim tab. I was able to complete the dimpling and countersinking of the skin and the spar, and match drill the hinge to the trim tab. Mike has several different thicknesses of hinge at the hangar and we used a slightly larger width to solve my edge distance issue from yesterday. Finally we set up the trim tab to align it with the elevator as shown below in the pictures. Unfortunately my bends on the end do not allow for the proper clearance alignment. The inboard edge is sticking out by approximately 1/8 inch.

Afterwards we flew to a fly-in at Smoketown Airport in PA. (You can see Mike’s post here.) Great flight, good food, and several cool aircraft on the ground. We also got the opportunity to see two other trim tabs to consider my issue. After that it was very apparent that my error is on the elevator tabs. I’ve bent them too close to the tab. My solution will be to cut the tabs off and install a riblet. I’m hoping to tackle that later this evening or tomorrow.

Here is the trim tab in line with the left elevator.

And the deviation…

Mike on the ground in his RV-7 at Smoketown.

On base.

Just for fun I used my MotionX GPS on the iPhone to track our flight. Here are the screen shots. 212mph max. The average speed is a little bit low because I recorded during taxi and takeoff. The GPS signal dropped off at spots.. but heck, its just a cheap iPhone app. Did the trick for my purposes today.