At last! Two and a half months after ordering this kit, all the parts arrived. Just in time too. To complete this horizontal stabilizer, I need the horn (black piece in second picture) which was one of the backordered items that just arrived. You can see that I riveted it to the ribs that will create the inside end cap for both the right and left elevators.

In the morning I continued with the spars and ribs that were cleco’ed last time. I up-drilled, deburred, filed, scrubbed, cleaned, cleco’ed again, and finally riveted. As I was trying on the skins, I realized that I had the center ribs attached to the wrong surface of the rib base. So I got to drilled out my first pull-rivets. It wasn’t as bad as I feared.

The skins don’t fit as nice as the vertical tail skin. This is a bigger, more complicated surface… maybe that’s why. Once I got enough clecos in though, it did flatten out and I think it’ll be okay. See first pic.

Once the skins were inplace, I tested the fiberglass tips. These will need to be trimmed as well. But in order to know how much, I need to get the elevators ready. So I built the elevator horn (second pic), and drill out the holes for the hinges.

That was a full 8 hours.

Horizontal Tail Elevator Horn Elevators