Horizontal Stabilizer

January 24, 2002

 Received empennage kit January 15, 2002. It all starts with two innocent looking boxes. This box contains the small parts bags, ribs, spar doublers, fiberglass tips and other small misc. parts.

January 25, 2002

The second and larger box contains the skins and spars. Completed inventory on January 25, 2002. Only a few small parts were missing. Van's shipped them out and I had them within a week.

January 26, 2002

I couldn't wait to play with the new tools.  Van's sends some scrap material sheets of different thicknesses to practice on. Here's my first attempt at flush riveting. Not bad for a rookie.

February 1, 2002

Fabricated and drilled angle attach brackets. Fortunately there was enough stock to make an extra one since I got a little happy with the bench grinder and took too much material off of one side of one bracket.

February 2, 2002

Cleco'ed, match drilled spars and spar doublers, angle attach brackets, outboard hinge brackets.

Notice anything wrong with this picture? Duh!! Cleco'ed and match drilled to the WRONG SIDE of the spar. No harm done but I sure felt stupid. The first of many times (so I'm told). As other builders have said, READ READ READ then REREAD the drawings.