With the elevator sub structure complete, it was time to begin putting it all together and getting it all riveted in place finally. First I needed to finish dimpling the elevator skin, the DRDT2 makes quick work of this BTW, highly recommended! With that all done it was time to fit the structure in place inside the skin including the counterweight and its supporting structure.

After the initial fit and much to my chagrin, the counterweight was still too big to fit inside the structure without causing a bowing effect due to the tight fit. So out it came and onto the vise it went to be filed down some more. Initially the fit of the pieces by themselves all mocked up together was good. However when everything went together including the skin, it was obvious that it was still a bit too tight to work. So just a little bit of work with some files and I had the size where it needed to be. I had to countersink the holes again since I took off a bunch of material off the front face.

With that complete it was time for another fit. Still tight so I used a little rubber motivation to get it to click into place. A couple whacks with the mallet was just enough to get the counterweight past the backside of the dimples and to get it to essentially lock into place. So it's now in there, basically no coming out now without removing a bunch of rivets first. Glad to be past that stage.

With that done it was time to begin riveting the skin to the substructure and the counterweight support structure. This is mostly accomplished with the 3-3.5 flush head rivets which are the most commonly used rivets for the skins. There are a few places in the counterweight support structure that need longer versions of that rivet due to there being several part layers needing to be fastened together. There are two rivets in this area that utilize a 3-4.5 sized rivet as they have to secure 4 different part layers on top of one another.

All in all the rivets all went in without a fight. I just used my hand squeezer for better control and managed not to mess any of them up. There are a few areas at the very rear of the skin on the inboard and outboard edges, 2 rivets on each half, one on top and one on the bottom, so four total rivets that I could not set during this session as I believe they will have to be bucked in order to be put in place.

That just leaves the leading edge rivets that attach the skin to the elevator spar as well as those four hard to get to rivets and that will close up the right side elevator. I did also add a dab of RTV sealant at the rear of each stiffener as per the popular guidance these days. In hindsight I should have done it earlier than I did this afternoon because it was a bit hard to reach.