Assembly: Horizontal Stabilizer

Pages 8-10 through 8-12
10/25/2024 - 12/1/2024

My dad unexpectedly passed away on August 5th, 2024.  This of course put just about everything on hold except for taking care of family and working.  Finally near the end of October, I actually felt like getting back into the shop.  I actually did not like the cradles I had built back near the end of July for the stab, so I first rebuilt those.  This was really the first major section where we needed to use the rivet gun.  It did not start out well and almost immediately I (Dan) screwed up one of the nose rib rivets, which also flattened out the dimple.  After drilling it out, we agreed that the nose rib needed to be replaced.  We continued with the rest of the nose ribs - we slowly got better with each one, but found these to be really challenging.  We carefully inspected each rivet and I drilled out one or two others that were not correct.

We bought these portable platforms from Home Depot and they made it much easier to rivet the skins.