06/04/2018 Horizontal Stabilizer- Marked Bend Lines and Drill positions on Front Spar (3 Hours)

The front spar requires more work than the rear spar, because as Van’s points out in their instructions that the front spar material were designed for RV-8, so it requires some trimming and bending of the materials to fit RV-7. I’m not a big fan of this kind of work because measuring by ruler and bending by hand do not seem like very accurate to me. I thought all the parts of pre-drilled with match holes! To make thing worse, the front spar section of the plan instructions is poorly organized to say the least. It feels like the result of a lousy job of copying and inserting of the horizontal stabilizer cracking SB steps into the original plan.

I spent hours and hours searching on forums trying to gain some clarity on the steps(thanks VansAirforce!), and I even ended up sending an email to Van’s tech support asking about the location of the “bend line” because I simply could not find it in the detail view specified by the instruction(turned out that the instruction in the plan pointed to the wrong detail view, the bend line location info is available at the bottom left corner instead of the top right corner of the plan).

First I separated HS-00001 into two pieces and deburred the cut area.

Then I trim the spar flange to near the bend line. At this point I was waiting for Van’s reply on the exact location of the bend line, but I sort of figure out at least it will match the shape of the reinforcement angles, so I went ahead and trim conservatively.

After that I got the response from Van’s and get my ruler out to measure and mark the bend lines.

Then I match drilled the holes inboard of the bend line. This is out of order of official step, but I wanted to know the location of holes near the edge of the spars so that I can try my best to maintain edge distance requirement when drilling relief hole and trimming edges later.

Last, I mark the location of the relief holes that I’ll need to drill out near the edge of the bend line.