More elevator primer and riveting

I finally did the last batch of primer (or, it was supposed to be the last, at the time) - since it was a little cold, I had to use a tent (provided by my colleague Rick - thanks!! :) ) to set up a poor man's paint booth:

Paint tent set up

Inside the tent, all ready to prime

I made one more small mistake - I scuffed E-918 with PreKote, without realizing it's an exterior part. I got a replacement.

With all parts primed, I got back to back-riveting the main elevator ribs:

Riveted elevator ribs

As expected, a bunch of those had to be drilled out and replaced (but only 3 oops rivets were needed):

Bad rivets removed for replcement

I also riveted one of the tip skins:

I test fit the counterweights in there, and the clearance from the rivets is very tight, but it fits:

Counterweight fit test

I was going to rivet the other tip skin, but since I mistakenly primed its outside, I ended up deciding to just replace that skin for a new one (yes, that means drilling/deburring/priming/dimpling again, but why not do it right).

I also decided to make a small change to Mouser's static wick installation (which I was previously following strictly) - he has the outboard forward nutplate inside the tip rib:

Mouser's outboard static wick nutplates

That's hard to install (as you can see in his picture, one of his rivets is not set all the way), and while the Dayton-Granger diagram says to install them as close as possible to the tips, I figured that moving them less than an inch inboard wouldn't greatly affect static discharging, but would make installation significantly easier:

Nutplates moved inboard a bit - much easier!

It's still tight in one dimension (to find the right spot where it doesn't touch the bottom skin), but that would be true anyway, and now I can move the nutplates forward arbitrarily to find that sweet spot without being constrained by the tip rib hole that the nutplate would attach to:

Point where static wick nutplate doesn't touch the bottom skin (the one on top)

It also moved the inboard attachment point further away from the foam rib location (keeping the 12" distance between them):

Both static wick attachment points for one elevator

With this I need two more of those reinforcement plates, so I cut those (they'll also need priming whenever I do it the next time).

I riveted the hinge reinforcement plates and nutplates to the forward spars:

Hinge attachment doublers and nutplates installed

The instructions call for having 96˚ on the rear spar and 84˚ on the forward one, which took a lot of careful bending with a hand seamer (they were off by 2-3 degrees, which was quite noticeable when I put the skins together for checking the static wick install positions above):

Another seemingly simple task was to rivet the gussets to the rear spars, but I managed to screw that up by riveting one of them backwards and had to redo it:

Oops

Much better!

I went on to rivet the left rear spar to the ribs and skin, and got it about halfway done (I tested using riveting tape to minimize damage to the skin from the rivet set, and it worked):

About half of the rear spar rivets are set

This naturally involved a few more mistakes to be fixed:

Damn!

Next I need to do the same for the right-side elevator - bending the spars to the right angle, riveting the rear spar, riveting the tip rib skin (after I drill/deburr the replacement skin), then on to the trim tabs.

Time lapse:

Total elevators time: 115.1h
Total elevators rivets: 493