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It's been a month since I have worked on the plane and it makes me sad. I don't have the ideal circumstances to be building a plane I guess but it's better than not building it at all. Anyway to get myself back into the groove of building, I picked up on the right elevator. A month ago,I finished the right elevator skin and stiffeners so I moved on to building the right elevator structure. I started to cleco together the right elevator counterweight assembly which forms the outside tip of the elevator and holds the lead counterweight. Up until now, everything in the kit has fit together really almost magically and has been basically a perfect fit. Then I got to this part. I started clecoing the parts together only to end up with the situation here in the picture.  As you can see, the middle row of holes do not line up, not even close really. Since there are parts for both the left and right elevator counterweight assemblies, I tried switching up the parts to see if I could get a better fit. Out of every possible combination of parts, the fit was pretty much unchanged. Either the holes in the ribs are too far apart or the holes in the outer skin that covers the two ribs are too close together. I emailed Van's asking about this because I think this is actually an error in the kit because all I did was pull the parts out of the box to put them together, I in no way had an opportunity to mess this up. They said just to clamp the ribs together really tightly and make sure the rib flanges were perpendicular to the web. I did and clamped them as best I could and it still didn't really line up. Next I looked online and it seems other people had this same issue and they solved it by clamping it and then more or less jamming the clecos into the holes. So that's what I did. I mixed and matched the parts to get the best initial fit and then clamped and jammed. I did both sides right now because I don't really want to do this over at a later time. At days end, here's what I ended up with. Also, I drilled the two holes in one of the lead weights into the ribs (hadn't actually done this as of this picture). That will be the right side I guess. 
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| Thanks for visiting! | Last Update: 25 May 2012 |