So today was a bit frustrating. Our task today was to bend the tabs on the elevator skin for the trim tab... we weren't succesful in doing this. We previously bent the trailing edge of the elevator skin to the final shape and this didn't leave us much room to properly bend the tabs in. We did our best to clamp everything down and give it a go, first starting with a block of wood as the mandrel and trying to use the rivet gun with a flush set to finish it off. Everything was going ok, but the gun destroyed the tabs! Ahhhh!!
We tried a few methods to fix this. We initially cut off approximately 1/2 inch where the tab is towards the tip of the elevator. We were going to make a small riblet to fill in this gap between where the trim tab would be and the elevator. After about five hours or so we decided to just do it the right way and we're biting the bullet and ordering a new left elevator skin on Monday, quoted at $63.53. Sad day, but now we'll be prepared for the next time around.
Don't get discouraged! Mr. Murphy will visit every chance he gets. Measure twice... cut once. The quality of workmanship on an airplane is necessarily very high. On your first flight, you want to concentrate on flying, not remembering all the mistakes that were not corrected properly.
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