Yep, after all these years I finally completed the elevator builds by glassing the inboard edge with 1 ply of BID.   Success! (haha)

But allow me to back up just a bit first.  Yesterday I did a fair bit of sanding on the epoxy wiped longerons, turtledeck and forward fuselage areas.  I also sanded some micro that I had reapplied to the front edge of the glare shield.

In cleaning up the threaded inserts on the canopy internal lock microswitch block, I realized that the mounting screw hole spacing wasn’t correct, so I corrected that in CAD and kicked off another 3D print of it.

This morning I went to mount the new microswitch block and discovered I had moved the hole in the WRONG direction in CAD, so I (re)moved the hole and reprinted yet another block, which I installed.  And yes, I did an ops check and it works a treat.

My next goal was to get the elevators off the canard to allow me to sand them down and micro them up.  Well, the way the bolt goes through the inboard tube to secure these elevators in place, the canard must come off and both elevators removed together to provide the clearance required to get the bolts out.  Thus began the canard removal operation (first I did a final sanding of the inboard elevators ends to ensure that once glassed and painted, there would still be 1/16″ of clearance).

I was quite expecting some huge drama in getting the 3/16″ stainless steel hinge pins out, but they came out with some vice grips and steady force, but no crazy antics requiring power tools and/or expletives!

Here we have the pair of elevators off the canard.  Note that when I decided to go with the inboard elevator fairings these elevators were mounted on the canard and I didn’t want to waste time removing them, so I trimmed the inboard 1.5″ off in-situ… and that future point to finalize the task is now.

I marked the glass to be trimmed —again, that I couldn’t get in to cut while constructing the elevator fairing when I removed the inboard 1.5″ (pic 1)— then trimmed it off with my Fein saw (pic 2).  I then cleaned up the tube of the old epoxy and glass residue.

Here we have the pair of the elevators ready for a ply of BID on their inboard face, to FINALLY complete the construction of the elevators!

I made a paper template, then cut and prepregged a ply of BID for each elevator. After wetting out the prepregged BID, I then cut it using my template.  After making some flox (near the tube) and micro internal corners and applying wet micro to the blue foam, I then laid up the ply of BID.  I then peel plied the layups and left them to cure overnight (sorry for the blurry pic).

I’ll offer another point of note in that these layups are close to the last of all plans-required layups that I’ll need to finish for this bird.  The only other ones are the underside of the top lips of the wings and strakes at the seam between the two (both sides).

With these layups complete, I then applied some micro on the inboard edges of the canard where they intersect the aft nose/avionics cover as well as some touch ups around the canard mounting notches in the nose (no pics).

Tomorrow my main priority is to finalize the sanding of the epoxy wipes and do any clean up/added micro tasks required.  I’ll then continue to work the canopy, canard, aft nose cover and nose hatch finishing to get all that knocked out and ready for paint.