First Major Mistake & Elevators

Mistake

I've made a number of mistakes, but I usually catch them and recovery before I ruin a piece or two... or in tonight's case three.  This one requires a very large piece to be reordered and a delay in my horizontal stabilizer construction... but I guess that beats the tail of the plane flying off and spiraling to my death!

Back story is yesterday I did some work on the plane with a buddy, not much but showed him how to match drill, deburr and cleco.  Then I did a bit of a workshop taking some scrap and showing him how to dimple and finally drive a rivet.  Then did some minor things on the project and set it away for the night.

This afternoon I received the new band saw blade so swapped that and finalized fabricating some brackets.  Going off what I cleco'd yesterday I started mounting the brackets and noticed some of the holes weren't matched drilled... Thinking it was because I missed them on the match drilling I went ahead and finished them out... then I started match drilling the bracket and it occurred to me that I had the spar caps on the wrong sides and the doubler upside down... what does this mean?  A lot of of extra holes....

Red circles are 'bonus' holes.

The doubler was untouched, so I thought maybe the structural integrity would be fine but since I'm not an engineer and it's my first plane decided to send Vans the picture and give them a call.  Builder support looked at this picture and was concerned with how close a few of those holes were on the spar web... basically said if it was his plane he would replace that part...  Good enough for me so I reordered the Spar and the spar cap pieces... even though they would probably work and be fine, might as well get it 100% correct. All in all, it's just more time and about $90... peanuts compared to the grand scale of things and hey this is supposed to be an educational endeavor so I'm getting educated.

Elevators

Section 9

Being a bit distraught over my mess up I didn't want to leave the evening on that note... My buddy came over tonight and we started going through the elevator build.  I could of done some more of the HS pieces but at this point didn't want to end up confused again so I will start it over once I get the parts.

Much like the rudder this section starts with separating a few pieces. Cleaning the edges and connecting them with clecos.

Buddy learning how fun deburring is!

I ended the building session by match drilling the top holes, swamping the clecos and then match drilling those holes. Also ensured I labeled each pair accordingly, so I don't get them mixed up. The end result is below.

This week I'll work slowly through the elevator parts until my replacement pieces come back.  I'll then put this up and jump back to the HS.