A Milestone

11/23/14

This week the horizontal stabilizer parts were abraded with ScotchBrite, cleaned with acetone and labeled in Sharpie blue.

I built a spray table from 1/2 inch PVC.  Wire cloth was stretched between two sides.  The sides with the legs rotate so the whole thing folds flat for storage. The table was placed on a plastic tarp on our lanai  (that’s a screened back porch for you northerners).

Internal surfaces were painted with SEM self etching rattle-can primer.  I chose one part primer for these interior parts for simplicity of process.  Our 66 year old Globe Swift has no interior primer in the fuselage and the metal still shines.  We’ll move up to two part epoxy primer for the cabin interior and other wear and tear areas.

Assembly was straight forward.  Dolly ran the 3x rivet gun and I did the bucking.  Our riveting skills slowly improved.  Of the 500 plus rivets in the horizontal stabilizer we chose to drill out and replace 17.

Bought a flush swivel rivet set from Avery Tools, and it made all the difference in the world.  The rubber guard around the set keeps it flat on the surface of the work and prevents the kind of skin dings I made on our practice kit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have not purchased a pneumatic rivet squeezer.  An armstrong manual squeezer is great for building chest muscles.  The finished HS looks great.

The blue plastic is going to be left on the skins until we arrive in Michigan next spring.

The horizontal stabilizer required twenty days to complete.  I’m not trying for any speed record.  Being retired I have been able to put in more daily time .  I’m not keeping count of hours but guestimate the HS required ~125 hours of shop time.