Mounted Elevators and Rudder

Today we finished rolling the leading edge of the left elevator, and this was a bear.. Initially we tried a 1" diameter pipe to roll the leading edge, but when we clecoed it together it didn't look correct at all, so we finished rolling it with our 3/4" pipe and this got it perfect! It only took 4 tries to get it right..

After we had the leading edge all riveted together we got to work on mounting the elevators and rudder. We trimmed the corners of the skin on the horizontal stabilzer enough to where we could have the elevators swing freely, we didn't get any pictures of this though. We then trimmed the inboard flange of the 603PP spars for down elevator clearance. Once the elevators were all mounted, we moved to the rudder. The vertical stab didn't need any trimming for clearance so this step was pretty easy! All we had to do was drill the hinge point holes to #12 and insert the bolts, which takes a little practice. We ended up using hemostats to be able to work in the tight quarters.

And of course once all the control surfaces we're mounted we had to set it all up and make it look like a tail section!