Horizontal Stabilizer - Day 4

Tonight was a fun night! We continued onto section 8-9, adding the stringers and rear spar to the HS assembly, and clecoing the entire skin into place. Now comes the fun task of final-drilling every single hole in the skin, through any combination of ribs, stringers, and spars. Sarah and I decided to split sides and each work either the top or bottom skin. First, though, we needed to figure out which drill was the lightest one so that Sarah could use it ;-)

Ergonomics [and Chivalry] 101: Sarah determines which DeWalt 14.4V drill is lighter using the epoxy-mixing/postage scale.

After an arduous drill-usage negotiation, I took my 2.1kg drill to the bottom skin while Sarah took her 1.8kg drill to the top skin, and we spent the next several hours final-drilling every hole in the horizontal stabilizer. Just as drilling was coming to a close, our friend Brannen stopped by to watch and help with the process. After disassembly, all the holes needed to be deburred and then dimpled, which everyone including our dog Mesa was happy to watch:

Everyone, even the dog, was told to act serious while Mike works.

The dimpling process is getting pretty familiar by now. I've learned that putting one handle of the squeezer into a vice makes it a lot easier to run it through each hole in each part in the least amount of time. An hour or two of dimpling later, and it was prime time!

The HS bits, 97% primed

Unfortunately, I ran out of primer around midnight. This mostly affected the HS front spar, but many of the parts could have used a little more attention to the corners, etc. I quickly hopped over to Walmart (dressed to the 9's, of course) in the hopes that they would have some more in stock, but alas they were still out from the last time I had checked a couple weeks ago. This means that I'll have to wait two days before priming again, since the instructions say that additional coats must be applied within 1 hour or after 48 hours. Time to call it a night!