I busied myself tying up some loose ends today. I pulled the laminated tip bow from the form and cleaned it up. The elevator spar is nearly done. The framing is complete and the plywood backing has to be glued on, but it came out beautifully straight. I trial fit it to the stabilizer and they seem to like each other's shape well enough. I was going to try to find a cabinet shop with a thickness sander to run the spar through, but got impatient and ran it through the planer instead. I thought it might tear up the cross pieces with the grain parallel to the blades, but it came out fine. For dimensioning anything at all, that planer is the best thing since sliced bread.
After scarfing the long 1.5mm ply backing for the elevator spar, and gluing to the tip bow to the rudder, I started working on something I've been avoiding for some time now: bending the control tube that routes the trim tab cable through the stabilizer. You only get one chance at that or else it's a phonecall to Alfred for another tube. The trick to bending is not letting the tube kink or collapse on itself. To achieve this, the tube is typically set into a curved channel that keeps the tube walls from pushing out to the sides. Another method is to fill the tube with sand to prevent it from folding and compressing. I did both. First I tried routing a channel in a curved block, and made nothing but noise, sawdust and firewood. Then I convinced myself that the channel didn't have to be a semicircular profile, and just bent the tube into a curved channel created by clamping three blocks together, one block recessed between the other two. That worked.
The tube curves through the interior of the stabilizer as if there are no obstacles in its path, but there are, and the manual has me putting reinforcing fillets of cotton flox epoxy around place the tube punches through a spar or rib. I mixed some up with West System epoxy and made some practice fillets to see what the stuff is like. It doesn't behave very nicely. It's difficult to get a smooth texture, but nobody will ever see it. It is supposedly quite strong.
Since I've gotten my pilot license, I want to buy a plane and go places, like any other idiot who just got his ticket. My goal is ultimately to fly to my inlaws: from here down to Torrance, CA, past the Los Angeles airport. It lies under a knotted mass of Class B airspace, holes punch through it here and there for VFR traffic. It seems a matter of both proper homework and experience. I think I might get both if I just take some dual out of Torrance itself.
