07/01/2018 Horizontal Stabilizer – Right side Inboard Ribs (3 Hours)

Today I continue working on the right horizontal stabilizer. It’s essentially another day of repeating what I have done on the left half of the horizontal stabilizer, but try to avoid making the same mistakes.

I shape deburred the HS-00005 and HS-00006 inboard ribs for about a hour to remove faceting risk. Then I inserted both piece into the assembly to mark the holes location on flanges. Similar to left horizontal stabilizer, I only fluted HS-00005 a little bit and didn’t have to do anything to HS-00006 to make both of them straight. I inserted both pieces into the assembly after fluting.

The next step I need to clamp and drill HS-00005 to the aft spar HS-603PP. Today I found a new way to mess up my drilling by putting the clamp too close to the hole, and the inference between the clamp and drill bit cause a slightly enlarged hole on HS-603PP. Thank goodness that hole is not close to any edges or other holes that might lead to minimum distance issue. The AN470AD4-7 rivet to be inserted into the hole should fill in that a little bit missing material in the enlarged hole easily.

Then I moved on to the holes between HS-00006 and HS-00005. Drilling HS-00006 onto HS-702 front spar is straight forward as before. Then when I need to mark the holes on HS-710 and HS-714 spar, I learned my lesson from last time(the hole location on HS-710 resulted in the hole in HS-00005 almost too close to the edge). I “cheated” a little bit by adding 1/32 inch to the 7/16 inch specified edge distance for HS-710. After marking the hole with that extra buffer, I measured all the pieces including HS-710, HS-00005 and HS-702 and determined that the slightly improvised hole location should not cause any distance issue for other pieces. I then drilled out those 4 holes on front flange of HS-00005 before calling it a session today.

For some reason my camera missed the time lapse photos for most of the deburring process :(. After further investigation, I found out what happened. This camera always displays photos x/9999 on its screen, even though the SD card has more much storage room. This morning I recorded time lapse images 9979th to 10378th. When I turned on the camera tonight, it started with file name 10000 incorrectly(should have started at 10379 instead of 10000, based on what’s previously inside the folder), effectively overwriting images named 10000 – 10116th recorded in the morning. So I lost 116 images (about an hour worth of work based on my 20 second time lapse setting). Clearly this camera manufacture is just like most of the U.S. software company these days that ignore the importance of software testing, lol.

Well, at least the steps I did on left horizontal stabilizer were recorded a couple weeks ago. I’ll remember deleting the files on my camera regularly.