With the first half of day two devoted to squaring that fuselage, we turned to the tail feathers!

Here's the horizontal stabilizer and elevator in the foreground and the rudder in the background (some assembly required)



I had put together a rudder at home using a very convoluted, overdone jig - and wasn't satisfied with the result. Note the electrical tape outline, the couple of blocks, and one of the two circles used to bend around used by Robert and I to whip a completely awesome one in about two hours:



Onto the horizontal stabilizer and elevator! First I muck up the drawing by "helping" Jim with the math and measurements, but then we sort it out and get to it.

HUGE lessons on building with this! I would have totally stressed the bends on the inside and outside of the elevator (in the foreground), spending a lot of time figuring out the perfect radius for each.

"C'mon, Frank, here's the tangent line here and here. Find something that makes the circle that fits and looks good and just bend around it," Robert says.

So I used that little circle for the rudder bend on the outside and a wire spool for the big one inside.



Next lesson was on annealing aluminum. Jim showed me this great technique of putting a sharpie pen mark where the temper has to be taken out and heating it until the mark disappeared (but no more). Then it's soft enough to pound flat and bend without cracking the metal!
Note the erroneous center line drawing and the rounded edges on metal. They're both my work! Snips and belt sander made it nice and roundish on the ends. The tube actually fuzed on the end in the pounding process (ball peen hammer).



The outline of the horizontal stabilizer is laid out and really nice "fish mouth" joints put on the end - Jim once again played school master and showed me how to make them look professional and un-ugly when they get covered.



Time to put in those braces! Some work required, as they're the flat pieces of metal laying there.

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