Stjohn's RV-7

4 hours.
Got the two skins of the left elevator riveted together in preparation for the big tuck. The riblet went in just fine, and I managed to get all but 3 of the aft spar done with AN426 rivets, instead of the blind rivets it calls for. If the elevator tabs had still been there, I would have had to use blind rivets on all of them. Just a quick shout out to Brown Tool: the C-Rex yoke is awesome. It’s a 4-1/2″ c-yoke with a tapering nose that accepts sets and dies. There really isn’t much on the empennage you can’t reach with this thing. It’s really friggin’ heavy though, and it tends to aggravate any work-induced RSI’s, but I dig it.
Oh, and a confession: When I got the stuff all riveted together, I realized that i’d put the control horns on backwards. Right was left and left was right. For the first time in a long while, I felt like it was time to toss the whole assembly into the street. All I could visualize was Gunnery Sgt Hartman after Pvt Pyle borks a shoulder-arms order in “Full Metal Jacket.”
Slap. “What side of your head was that, Private Pyle!” Slap. “What about that?”
So I had to peel back the skin from a corner of the right elevator and drill out the control horn, then drill out the left one and switch them. Fortunately, and this is pretty much all my airplane karma for the week, they went into their proper places extremely well and I was back to where I should have been in less than half an hour.