Back from Oshkosh after a great week! Lots of inspiration to be had up there, makes me want to work harder and longer but the lead times are controlling right now and you have to work with what you have!

Back to work on the elevator stiffeners. After cutting and cleaning up the right elevator stiffeners, per the plans I made the left side stiffeners as well. Here the plans are a bit wonky and tell you to make a set of three stiffeners for the left elevator from your existing D, E and F stiffeners for the right elevator and then to trim each one of those by a set amount. The instructions on how to trim and how much to trim are on the construction drawings from both the left and right elevators and the whole task is a bit unclear. So instead I just cleco'd all the left side stiffeners in place, match drilled and drilled the holes as required and then manually trimmed those three sets of stiffeners for the left elevator. Seems like a lot of instructions, confusing instructions at that, just to get a few stiffeners made. If you follow the trimming instructions to the letter you will not have enough edge distance for the most rearward hole on a few of the stiffeners. The goal is to not have those 6 stiffeners too long to the point where they would contact the trailing edge folded surface. You really don't know how long they should or shouldn't be (other than what the plans call for) until you rivet them in place and then bend the trailing edge to its final shape. However with close attention I can judge that there will not be an interference problem once the trailing edge is bent to final shape so I'm happy with that.

Stiffeners, simple little angle pieces but takes a lot of time and effort to create them, clean them up, match drill them and then debur them. In all I probably spent 4 hours just shaping, edge deburring, hole deburring, shaping some more, match drilling and deburring the holes on the left elevator. Easy but time consuming. The right side stiffeners were created a few days ago but I still need to go back and debur the holes (will come back to that later).

The plans now have you remove all the parts and prep them for dimpling and primer. The plans also have you add the elevator trim port doubler to the left elevator at this time and match drill that and debur it as well. In order to keep all the stiffeners organized and to keep them from getting mixed up, I will concentrate on priming the left elevator interior skin and stiffeners, along with the trim doubler first. Then I'll go back to the right elevator.

The plans are sort of all over the place at this point with going back and forth between both elevators but they're just trying to knock out the stiffeners for both of them at the same time to make life easier down the road. After both elevators and stiffeners have been primed, then it's back to concentrating on the right elevator and completing that.

This work session ended with all of the left elevator components ready to be prepped for paint and dimpling.