It won’t be too long before I want to put the tail on so in preparation for that I had to go back and finishing mounting the stabilizer to the elevator. Putting the two together showed that there was interference between the nose skin and a bracket on the stab.
So I marked an area on both sides for trimming so that the nose would clear any obstacles while in motion.
Oddly I don’t have a picture of them cut.
I put a cleco into the hole where ultimately the two parts will be bolted together and then nudged the two pieces forward and back until all measurements between them were the same (i.e. they were parallel). I then carefully back drilled through the outboard hinge brackets into the stabilizer and enlarged to final size.
It was at this point that I noticed the elevator isn’t centred right to left on the stabilizer. On the picture above, the right hand side is flush with the end but the left hand side is about 6mm short. Hmmm. If I remove the cleco from the bolt hole I can move the elevator a couple of mm and everything is right but when the bolt goes in I am thinking it will not be. I shall have to see what can be done to fix this.
And so on that downer I quit for the day!