Left Elevator Counterbalance Skin

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A short half hour tonight. First thing was to grab the primed end ribs and get them clecoed to the left elevator spar. No problems there.

Looks good. Ready to rivet (but not tonight).

Next, I need to get the counterbalance skin taken care of (must be riveted to the skin before the skin can be riveted to the skeleton).

You can see I clecoed it in place and drew a line where the two overlap; I'll use this as my primer line.

Then, I realized I’m going to have a hard time deburring, dimpling, and scuffing with the blue vinyl on. [sigh] Off with the vinyl, re-cleco, redraw my line, then back off to deburr, dimple, and scuff.

After dimpling with tank dies where the skin sits under another dimple, and regular #40 dies where it doesn't.

While I had the #6 dimple die out (I’m attaching all fairings with screws for now), I moved over to the elevator skin and dimpled there, too.

Make sure you drill all holes that need to be dimpled with the #6 dies to #28 drill. This is slightly larger than the #30 you are used to.

Again (for the search engines), the correct drill bit size for a #6 screw and #6 dimple die is #28. Ask me what happens when you dimple a hole that isn’t drilled to the right size. (Hint: the same thing that happens when you overdimple using something other than a dimple die because you are too cheap to buy a #10 die…see below…)

Okay, back to the counterbalance skin.

These are dimpled to #8 (I don't have a #10 dimple die). last time, I used a punch set (with a little rounded lip on it) to enlarge the dimples to the equivalent of #10 dimple die.

Let’s countersink the counterweight as a female dimple die.

Looks good.

Uh oh. I went a little far with my makeshift die. I stared at this for approximately 0.0000001 seconds before realizing I had to scrap the part.

See the ginormous cracks? Yeah. Not good.

A closeup of the other one. Oops.

So, the reordered part count is up to 2.

I’m not worried, I have some other stuff I can be doing while I wait for a replacement counterbalance skin (E-713, $8.85) from Van’s. Also, I immediately put in my order with Avery for a #10 dimple die (along with some clecos, an edge roller tool, and some more drill bits).

USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB, ANDREW!

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