Tonight went well… I fixed the oil canning before riveting and without any modification! What I did was simple. The offending sections were between the 2nd and 4th stiffeners from the right (picture below). The area after the 2nd stiffener was the worst. I unclecoed the offending side completely from the skeleton and began clecoing inward from the outboard tip. I would drill the hole and then install a cleco. My hope was that I would smooth out just the slightest wrinkle in the skin towards the edge. I kept a close eye on the holes to make sure that the final drilling would not result in any holes that were eggs or oblong. When I got to the second to last stiffener I also began to work from the trailing edge forward on the rib. It worked like a charm. No more oil canning. I’m really glad this worked because I didn’t want to roll the dice on having the riveting alone fix the problem!

After that I finished final drilling both elevators, horns and counterweight assemblies. I disassembled both elevators and I’m ready for deburring and dimpling. I’m not sure when I will prime… as I still have the trim tab to do and that will need primed as well. I’d like to work it so that I only have to do ONE more priming session for the completion of the empennage but I have not looked far enough forward to see if that is feasible.

Final thoughts for the night. I’ve slowed down somewhat on construction. I’ve started graduate school in the evenings and I still haven’t ordered the wing kit. The wing kit takes about 8 weeks to ship after ordering, so I’m at least 2 months out from its arrival if I ordered today. The remainder of the empennage will not take me that long if I work fast. I hope to order the wings before the end of June… just waiting on the funding… ugh. 🙁

I was a bit late posting this week.  This post is actually from Monday night… I think.  I set about clecoing the skin to the skeleton and the elevator horns.  Two issues arose.  First, the one elevator horn was not aligning properly.  A little reshaping of the end rib flange to web radius and some strong arming of the clecos did the trick.  The more concerning issue is an area towards the root of the right elevator that is “oil canning”.  I’m not sure how to proceed.  I hope that riveting and bending the leading edge will exert enough pull on the skin to tighten it up.  The other option is to put a small stiffener in diagonally with proseal.  I’m leaning towards just pushing on and seeing what the result is.  If there are any negative flight characteristics, I can always rebuild later.

Here is the misaligned rudder horn.

I started out today by bending the elevators.  I was much more careful bending them this time to avoid the errors of bending the rudder.  The bends came out perfect!

On a side note, here is my new vertical stab holder I built.  I plan to expand on this and hang the rudder there as well.  I’m trying to plan ahead now that the wings are within sight…. despite not being ordered.

Final drilling the spar reinforcement plates.

The counterweight skin and rib.  This was a collasal pain in the butt.  The counterweight skin did not match the holes in the two adjoined ribs.  After consulting Van’s Airforce archives, I found that this is a common issue.  Some people recommended just drilling the holes out resulting in slightly imperfect or oblong holes.  With the added stress of the counterweight I did not want to reduce the strength with less than perfect holes.  The holes on the ribs were wider than on the counterweight skin.  In order to reduce that distance the radius between the flange and the web of the ribs needed to be reduced.  

I used the dead blow hammer to reduce the web-flange radius.  This took quite a bit of trial and error but eventually worked.  Another trick here is to cleco the skin in place without the counterweight.  After all the clecos are installed, then shove the counterweight in between.  The entire process took some finesse but eventually I had all the holes lined up and every cleco properly seated. 

Some pictures from the final skeleton.  Next step will be to cleco the skins and begin final drilling…