07/07/2018 Horizontal Stabilizer – De-vinyled and Finished Drilling Right Skeleton (2 Hours)

With the skins all drilled it’s getting close to deburring and dimpling time, so finally I have to remove the vinyl on the outside of the skin. I had the stupid imagination that it’ll be easier to remove the vinyl while the right skin is still clecoed on the skeleton, reasoning that the skin will be more rigid and won’t be flapping around when I draw lines on it. Well, that was definitely a big mistake, lol. Just removing and reinstalling the clecoes wasted a huge amount of time. To make things worse, I totally forgot what I learned from training videos earlier that after applying soldering iron I need to remove the vinyl immediately before it cools off and stick together again. I drew multiple lines with the soldering iron before I remember that, so I ended up having a hard time removing the vinyl along those lines(few of those lines I need to re-apply the soldering iron to melt the vinly again). I learned my lesson from working on the right skin, so the removal on left skin went quite a bit better and quicker.

Next I removed the right skin from right skeleton, and matched drill all the remaining holes between the HS-00001 doubler and HS-702 front spar, HS-710 and HS-714 reinforcement angles.

At this time, I have officially completed all the drilling process, entering the prime preparation(debur, dimple, filing) and priming stage.