I spent a fair bit of time fixing some sloppy work I had done on the empennage. This photo is taken looking up from below at the right end of the HS. You can see the end rib sticks out from the skin about 1/16" or so. Sloppy, sloppy. You know...this was "back in the day" when we had to drill our own holes. My empennage didn't come completely pre-punched like they started coming a few months later.
Anyway, I filed away the sticking-out flange. Another sloppy thing was that my counterweight wasn't perfectly square. It points inboard very, very slightly. Only half a degree or so, but it's enough that you could see the tapering gap if you looked closely. Yet another little detail that I could have prevented had I known WTF I was doing when I built the emp. I filed the HS end rib and skin flanges very, very slightly...
...and got that nice, uniform gap. You'd never know if I hadn't mentioned it. I sanded the elevator tip until it fit perfectly. I'm gonna be pretty happy with the fit here, I can already tell with it just laying in there.
I measured out and drilled #40 pilot holes in the elevator. I need to make more .020 backing strips, since I'm out of the ones I made a while back. I gotta take my sheet of .020 to the Cable EAA Chapter's hangar and use the shear up there. If only I had a shear and a brake, I would be unstoppable! 8^)
RV afficionado and friend Dan Hall stopped by the hangar on his way out to fly today. He has a gorgeous Ercoupe that he has put a lot of time into refurbishing. Turns out, this Ercoupe is the same one Bob Owens used to own way back when. Dan has recently repainted it (Sport AeroColor) and redone the interior in nice leather. Very pretty airplane.
Dan offered to take me up flying, which was a BLAST!!! With the windows down, it's not even cold or windy in there. It's a little small in the cabin, but it's a very simple, easy plane to fly. Taxiing on the ground with your hands is a trip. Other than a little adverse yaw when banking in a climb, the thing feels like a Cherokee. But it has a buttload more character, that's for sure.
When we got back, I was tinkering with the emp tips when I noticed something. I've raised the elevator counterweight to illustrate the issue better, but you can see that the HS tip is nicely tapered, kind of rounded along the whole curve. Well...not so with the elevator, where the counterweight arm is more or less flat/level, and then only the outer tip curves. So there's not perfect symmetry here. I mean, I'm seriously nit picking, but if you thought ahead, you could modify your elevator counterweight arms so that the arm skin tapers a bit. Something to do next time...or not!
