First Assembly

Time Worked: 4 hours

Date Completed: Nov 11, 2022

The previous owners of my kit had already completed the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, as well as the rudder.  And they had also started on the elevators, but unfortunately, the had mis-measured where to drill a hole and had messed up about $500 worth of parts. One of the requirements I had as we negotiated the price was that they'd replace any damaged parts as a term of the sale. True to their word, they purchased all of the parts to rebuild the elevators (skins and ribs). The parts arrived two days before Dave and I drove down to pick up the kit, so we were able to load them into the trailer at the same time as the rest of the kit.

In the picture below, you can see the ribs that were drilled improperly (black parts to the left) as well as the complete elevator control horn assembly, coated with green Duplicolor self-etching primer. I really like the color of the primer and plan to use it to coat all of the seams where parts meet and all external surfaces of the aircraft prior to painting. I'm toying with the idea of using just the primer to coat the inside of the fuselage to give it a simple warbird finish.

Admittedly, it was a little difficult to line up my drill to re-cut the holes in the ribs. The previous owners had already drilled out the pilot holes and ribs to the larger (#30 or 1/8") size. So there wasn't much room for error. I had to make sure the ribs were very tightly attached to the control horn while drilling.

To do this, I purchased a couple of 6" Swivel Pad Lock Grip Pliers (basically vice grip pliers in the shape of C-clamps) and I added adhesive felt furniture pads to the bottom of each of the swivel pads on the clamp to ensure the clamp didn't damage any aluminum parts.

It held very well during drilling. I had to use a sheet metal seamer to "adjust" the bends on the ribs provided by the Sonex factory. one was bent at about 80 degrees and the other was bent to about 65 degrees. To ensure they were able to lay flat on the table and match up with the control horn, I had to adjust the 65 degree bend to match the 80 degree bend on the other rib.