Robert August came over and hung out in the garage this afternoon and we dimpled & riveted all the stiffeners on both elevator skins. It was a big help to have an extra set of hands in maneuvering the skins in the DRDT@ dimpler.

It was also helpful to have a second set of hands available during the back riveting; In order to get the back rivet set on the rivets closest to the trailing edge, you have to pull back the upper skin, which causes the lower side to want to raise up off the plate. A second person can use one hand to hold the upper side back, and another hand to push down on the lower skin to make sure it's firmly on the plate.

I've known Robert since A&P school and recently taught his daughter to fly. Was fun to spend teh afternoon hanging out.

We also bent the trailing edges in the homemade brake I attached to one edge of a workbench. I deviated from the section 5 plans in how to make this brake; Vans shows that you should hinge 2 2x8 or 2x10 sections together so that the long edges come together to make the bend. I've seen others on VAF set it up so that the bending faces are the narrow edges, and it seems like this is the way to go. You can see what you're doing better, and by clamping a couple of wood clamps on the upper board for handles, you can get as much leverage as you would ever need.

I bent these with a 1/8" wooden dowel rod in the trailing edge as insurance against creasing the skin and it worked out great. There are a couple of areas where there is a slight fall off at the trailing edge, and I was able to massage most of that away with the wooden block hand seamers that Vans also suggests you build. Ended up with really straight trailing edges that I'm happy with.

You may recall that this is my second go-around with these elevators, and on the first one, I ended up with the 720 a b &c stiffeners with the flanges opposite the rest. I assumed that I had made a mistake in cutting and tapering these, so when I got new stiffeners, I was very careful to mark out the cuts based on the tooling notches that are already on the pieces you cut these out from. Sure enough, there is only one way to cut these, and those 3 sets are backwards to the Isometric view on the print. I had already talked to Vans and they said it's irrelevant which way the flanges faced and some guys on VAF said that some of them are stamped backward and that's just the way it is.