Title: Rear Spar finished, front spar begins
The last bit to accomplish on the rear HS spar was to attach the elevator hinge bracket with the four provided bolts, nuts and washers. I had to wait about a week to get the proper torque wrenches to finish the installation of the 4 bolts and torque them to the correct setting. With those in hand it was a simple matter of determining the 'torque drag' of the AN-365 nuts first and then adding that value to the called for torque value of this bolt/nut combo. To do that, I needed a needle style torque wrench to show the amount of force, ie torque, that it takes just to thread the nut onto the bolt. That was around 8 inch pounds, combine that with the called for torque value of 20-25 inch pounds for this bolt/nut combo, gives an overall torque setting of 28-33 inch pounds for the actual torque wrench. I set a value of 30 inch pounds on the wrench and with the characteristic 'click' set each nut/bolt to the appropriate torque setting. BTW, torque settings for the hardware are located in a table in Section 5 of the plans, page 5-20. A little torque seal, or witness mark to finish each one off and that section is finished. The torque seal will break if the nuts ever come loose and begin to back off and you will be able to see this on an inspection. Next up is the front spar, I gathered all the initial parts and began to mock them up only to realize that I had forgotten to finish drilling the holes for the left side of the spar and doublers that are part of the service bulletin. Whoops! Fortunately this wasn't a big deal and I just finished match drilling the remaining 14 holes that I had failed to finish in a previous step of the build. I also realized I had failed to final size drill a few holes on a couple of the ribs. The nice thing is that at this point in the build, I'm actually able to see a #40 hole and realize that these are normally used only for attaching the skin to the structure due to their small size. So a little bit of work with the drill and a quick once over with a deburring tool and the left side was finally ready to go. This was a good stopping point for the evening as I need to plan out the riveting of this part of the structure. I should be able to squeeze most of these rivets and I need to be careful as there is a set of four holes on each half that don't get riveted at this step because they need to have ribs attached to them. Additionally I'm starting to think about some type of jig to build to support the structure of the horizontal stab as it's a fairly large part when it's all put together.


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