Title: Finish rolling leading edge/start new trim tab
Productive afternoon and evening. First task was to finish rolling and riveting the leading edges of the left elevator. More massaging and rolling until I was satisfied. I've been working on this off and on for a few weeks now. It's time to finish and move on. Overall, I'm pretty happy with this side, only pillowing is on about 1/3 of the longest section and that was due to not being careful enough when hand massaging the one side of the skin that allowed it to get a bit warped. I can live with it. The rest looks ok. So time to move on. I am going to try rolling the entire section on the right elevator to see it that works better. With that finally finished it was time to get back to the trim tab rebuild. Parts have been here for a week just waiting to be used. I followed my own advice about the order in which to do things. Match drilling the holes for the control horns and then dimpling them BEFORE bending trailing edge and the end tabs turned out to be a good move. This time around I bent the trailing edge quite a bit further than round 1. I believe this was my main issue on the first one I built. You can see in one of the pictures the difference between version 1 and version 2. I was much more aggressive with the bend this time and made sure to keep the trailing edge set tight to the hinges. It came out much better this time and fits the spar nearly perfectly. With that done I used the same technique to bend the end tabs as round 1. Still think this is better than using a wood block form. This time I relied on the rivet gun to act as an air hammer a little more than the first time around and again, this worked really well to finish off the bending of the trailing ends which are very hard to bend by hand. The two small tabs were still a pain but they came out much better this time around and I'm actually happy I rebuilt it. Bends complete, it was time to see if the original hinge (that was already drilled) would still be viable to use with the new trim tab. It initially looked pretty promising. The trim tab side of the hinge still fits perfectly. So one less set of holes to drill there. Then I cleco'd the top half of the hinge to the elevator side and initially it looked perfect. I mocked up the straight edge along the trailing edge of the elevator and it is really close! If I was in a hurry and didn't have any more hinge material, I would just live with it as is, it's about 3/32' out from being true. Again my OCD will get the better of me and since it's a relatively simple fix, I will just make a new top half for the hinge and drill new holes that properly align the trailing edge so that it's perfect. So a good bit of progress today, I'm happy I rebuilt the trim tab, this version is way better than the first go around and I can still use half of the original hinge which saves some work. Next session I will finish mocking up the upper half of the hinge and get that drilled. Then it will be time to disassemble the parts, clean and prime before riveting everything back together and maybe, just maybe finish the left elevator finally!


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