Installed the elevator

TLDR

• Installed the elevator

Details

Installed the elevator today.

The elevator is bulky, my first concern is that it’s easy to get dropped on the floor during installation. So I cut 2 short piece of safety wire, aligned the elevator to the horizontal stab, and threaded the safety wires through the bolt holes on each end. This gave me some stability temporarily so I can work on installing the real bolts to connect the elevator and horizontal stabilizer.

You can see the safety wire is holding the horizontal stabilizer and the elevator together

Next step is to put the bolts and washers through to connect the horizontal stabilizer and elevator. As many other builders have said, the space is extremely tight to put the washer in.

I 3D printed a few washer holders to help with that. The holder is a little to wide, so I dripped some glue to make the washers stick onto the holder just long enough to put them in place.

The glue is just some random gasket sealant I found laying around

And threading the bolt wasn’t too difficult, but once the bolt dropped into the elevator it’s not very accessible. So I wrapped my safety wire around the bolt just in case they drop.

With the prep work, putting the bolts washers and nuts through became much easier.

But torquing the nuts were a little tricky too due to the confined space. My torque wrench didn’t really fit. So I had to grind down the socket so the wrench can barely reach the bolt. Then I torqued down everything to the AN4 spec.

Guess which socket was grinded down?

After two hours of playing with bolts in super small space, the work is done.