Wednesday January 3, 2007
Drilled Left Elevator (Left Elevator)
2.0 Hours

Tonight, I went out to the shop and finished deburring and smoothing the edges of all of the left elevator stiffeners. I had previously smoothed them down with the Scotchbrite wheel on my bench grinder, but I like to finish all of the edges off with Emery cloth.

Then, I drilled all of the stiffeners to the left elevator skin. The big piece that's missing is where the elevator trim tab will eventually fit.

I also drilled the trim tab motor attach arm reinforcement plate to the skin. The trim tab motor will sit on top of this with a little arm that sticks out through the skinny part of the hole on the left in this picture.

Another little skin with a smaller hole fits over the larger part of the hole on the right side of the picture. It attaches with a series of screws into nut plates that will get riveted onto the inside of this reinforcement plate. The rivets that attach the nut plates to the reinforcement plate need to be flush rivets, since the skin that screws into the nut plates needs to sit flush against the factory heads.

I have two (or three) options. The first, traditional option is to dimple the reinforcement plate and the nutplates and use a traditional AN426AD3 rivet in those spots. Some people opt to dimple only the reinforcement plate and leave the nutplates undimpled. This leaves a little gap between the nutplate and the reinforcement plate, though, and I don't really like that. The second option is to use NAS1027AD3 rivet, which is another variety of the "oops" rivet that I talked about yesterday. It has a shank the size of an AN426AD3 (3/32"), but a smaller head so that you could actually countersink the reinforcement plate (which is too thin to countersink for a normal sized AN426AD3 rivet).

I'll ponder which of these alternatives I want to go with while we're gone to Colorado. I ordered a few NAS1027AD3 rivets so that I can have them on hand if I opt for that method.

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