Day 34: Stabilizer Skeleton Assembly (1hr 20)

The first business of the day was locating and drilling the upper and lower doublers into the front spar.

A tip rib gets attached to each end of the spars and an L-angle gets cut to support it against the front spar. I marked and drilled the location of the rivet holes and attached it to the spar.

As with the other kits, I am using the DVDs to verify each action I take (double checking with the photo guide and plans of course) and the DVD says that the next stage is to cut the front brackets to size and then position them in the right place on the spar and drill. I wasn’t looking forward to this since it would require more hacksawing and some real awkward work in getting them positioned. So I was real surprised to pick up the brackets and find them pre-cut AND pre-drilled – score! Attaching them to the skeleton was as easy as cleco’ing them in place. They get riveted with A5 rivets so once put in place I drilled the holes with the size 20 drill bit.

The spars are attached to each other by some rear ribs that go between the spars, and there are some nose ribs that are also attached. These are all pre-drilled so it was a simple task of cleco’ing them together.


The tip ribs get attached to each end and to the L-angle but the straight edge of the L-angle needs to be trimmed in order to fit inside the rib.