It's been more than a month since I worked on the plane last time. First I had a guest at home for one week, then I was three weeks in Germany and the US for work, and after coming back home it took a few days to settle down again. But at least I wasn't completely deedless. I brought back quite a few tools from the US; mostly stuff I cannot easily get here, like ratchet sockets and wrenches in inch, a torque wrench in in*lbs, but also some gadgets from Avery and Cleaveland as well as several vise-grip C-clamps (why are they so much more expensive here?!?). I also bought a new kitchen scale, uhm, sort of. It's a precision balance with 100mg resolution and 10kg capacity. I've been looking for a good scale for some time now, as I will need something for the expoxy, primer and paint, and with the large capacity I can use it for other things, too. The inauguration was baking bread right after coming home -- this really is the perfect kitchen scale!
'nuff said, tonight I was back in the workshop. One of the things I brought back home from the States was a replacement rib for the HS-405 I screwed up last time, so the clear candidate to work on was the left horizontal stabilizer. After the long break I had a slow start, as it took me some time to get back into it. I edge finished and fluted the rib, then I started drilling it at the aft flange. This time I had learned the lesson and clamped everything tight, using one of my shiny new vise-clamps:
After also drilling the top and bottom flanges I came to the part where I trashed the first HS-405: the joint of the two inner ribs with the front spar and the two spar reinforcement angles. Again I fixed everything before drilling. The two outer holes could be drilled through the pilot holes in the rib, as per instructions, since the spar and the two angles hadn't been drilled before:
But I had already drilled the two center holes with the first HS-405, so instead of having a pilot hole in the HS-405 rib I used the existing hole in the spar to match-drill the HS-405 from the front:
This time the whole thing went completely uneventful, so I could finally match-drill the front rib to the skin. I also finish-drilled all the other skin holes, so the horizontal stabilizers are now ready for disassembly.
