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Elevator, page 3

PROBLEM (Again) When I took apart the spar/skin assembly to debur the holes and apply zinc chromate, I discovered my spar holes were below acceptable minimums as defined by Zenith. They say that the center of each hole should be at least 10 mm from the edge. Clearly, I am only about 5 mm on most of these spar holes (pictured above).

I fired off an email to Zenith and after a few days I called Nick Heintz at Zenith and told him about my problem. Later, I got a reply to my email from Caleb Gephardt…anyway both agreed that the best way to solve this is to put in a second line of rivets offset by 20 mm from the first and at the right height on the spar to be legal.

Below is a picture of the rivet line from inside the spar assembly after the second line of rivets has been added. I asked Caleb what would be the weight penalty, and he said not bad because rivets don’t weigh much.


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Here is the rivetted elevator. The nose skin and gusset plates are on the outside of the rear skin. I like the looks of it! What, with all those rivets it kind of fits right in with my Frankenstein theme. Cool! Remember he wasn’t beautiful, but he was strong!

Oh, yeh. I drilled a couple holes for the electrical wire to be routed to the trim motor. I inserted a couple of rubber grommets and the wire provided by Zenith.

- November 4, 2006
Trim tab and trim motor installed.

- December 13, 2006

Email: porkchop_4@yahoo.com