Well, today was good and bad. Good because I got to work on the horizontal stabilizer, bad because I went to fast, didn’t really look or understand what I was doing, and ended up ruining some parts…

The first step on the HS is to lay the spar reinforcement bars into the two rear spars and get them matchdrilled.

Then, you start clecoing and matchdrilling the hinge brackets. Here is the center hinge bracket, one side of which is pre-drilled, the other side is not.

Next up, find the two angle brackets for the front spar and get them trimmed and clecoed to the front spar.

But here’s where the bad parts start. I got the forward spars clecoed together, but when I started matchdrilling, something didn’t seem right.

It turns out that I had these forward spar reinforcement plates clecoed in upside down, so when I matchdrilled, I messed up one of the forward spars and one of the angle brackets. Luckily, I stopped when it didn’t seem right and only ruined two parts, not four.

Obviously I didn’t turn the parts around and look at what would have been obvious, the pre-punched holes were going to cause drilling problems with the angles.

But I’ll throw some stones at the plans, too. See below, where it says “staggered rivet is oriented up?”

Does that mean the staggered hole should be up from the non-staggered holes? Or does it mean that the edge with one staggered hole should be towards the top of the forward spar.

Well, I guessed wrong.

I was mad at myself so I stopped taking pictures, but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. Onwards!

1.0 hours on the HS, 2 reordered parts…