07/17/2018 Horizontal Stabilizer – Deburred Edges (1 Hour)

I deburred the edges of the spars and skin today. Deburring spars is pretty easy with the bench grinder. But the skin is a little too big for me to hold steady against the bench grinder, so I ended up experimenting with the use of file and angle grinder. After trying different sequences, I found that using the file to perform a initial pass to remove the obvious uneven edges before using the angle grinder to smooth out the entire edge in general seems to yield reasonably good result for me.

After deburring the edges, I decided to try to put the entire horizontal stabilizer back together before sanding and priming. I did it because I want to check my dimpling and deburring result and I want to “preview” the riveting sequence. I basically followed the riveting instruction to cleco the whole horizontal stabilizer together. It’s almost a two hour task(I didn’t log this since it’s not called for by the plan), but it gave me some confidence that the pieces still fit together and I really know the sequence they will be riveted together.