-50$: My second unrepairable mistake
Hello! It's been a week and a half since my last post "First Rivets", and since then, A lot of progress has been made! The rudder is now complete, and I've made a small toaster rack to hold parts between building sessions.
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completed toaster setup. I'll be adding dowels as needed.
You can see the completed rudder there, and all primed on the outside. it's kinda a mess, I didn't know what to prime, and where, and now a lot of the outside is also primed. I am really hoping this doesn't affect the paintability, I had something special in mind for the tail.
Once the rudder was done, I had the parts for the vertical stabilizer, so I started on that. We got all the way to the priming, And I decided to cut it there. The main reason is that the entire vertical stabilizer is 20 parts, and of those, 12 need priming. It would be a small amount of time, and prepping the entire garage for the whole priming operation would be a lot of work for not a lot of priming.
So, naturally, I started on the horizontal stabilizer. The trouble is that I made my second big mistake (the first was the "Dimple Disaster"). The Stabilizer spars are somehow 100$ a piece, which looking at the store seems absurdly cheap for what you get. Anyway, it's like 8 feet long, and you really don't want to make a mistake. Luckily, I made the mistake in a 50$ part instead. The stiffener!
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Thar she blows. The countersink is supposed to be in the spar itself, but the part you're seeing is the spar stiffener. Just a matter of misinterpretation in this case. The instructions are very meticulous about marking the orientation of the spar, as it's not symmetrical across the XZ plane- there is a distinct top and bottom to this spar, but in marking that, and ensuring its position, I got so focused, that I made the countersink in the incorrect portion of the spar.. Now, do I think I could get away with this, installing a double flush rivet instead of a single flush? Maybe. The material is thick enough, and the rules allow it. The horizontal stabilizer's stiffener is not the part I want to experiment with for that though. We'll leave that part to the seat mounting rivets.