Elevator Counterweight Rib

Hello Everyone,

First post here to the site.. -8 right elevator - I'm having issues getting proper hole alignment between E-704 and E-702 spar. After several hours of fluting, flattening, and gentle "persuasion", I was finally able to get the counterweight skin to align properly with the two ribs, E-703 and 704. I've dug around the forums and find discussions about hole alignment with the ribs and the counterweight skin, but couldn't find any that address my issue specifically.

My issue is this - the holes on the aft flange of E-704 (counterweight rib) don't align with the holes in the spar web. ALL other holes line up perfectly, between the two ribs, the skin and E-703 (tip rib) to the spar flange. It's just these two that aren't lining up. Aside from ordering a new rib (not pre punched, if that's an option), I'm stumped.
Does anyone smarter than me have any ideas? Thanks in advance! Not sure about how to post images, but hopefully this works...

I had trouble with this. Since I hadn't yet riveted any of the pieces together, my solution was to cleco the E-703/704 ribs together, then cleco that to the elevator spar. Then, with a small carpenter's square, square up the rib and spar wrt the leading edge and side clamp the elevator skin to the outboard rib trailing edge. Then, and only then, I side clamped the skin to the rib trailing edge and match-drilled the outboard rib and trailing edge skin. Hope this helps.

Thanks Ken,

That sequence helped a bit.

1. Both ribs together.
2. Clecoed counterweight rib to spar.
3. Clecoed spar/rib assembly to skin.

That got things lined up well enough to match drill #30 all the rib/spar holes. Not perfect, but only very, very slightly out of alignment. Funny how just changing the order of things can change the alignment. It sure would be easier if they would leave the 704 rib un-punched. I would have saved hours of time...

Matt,

I'm 60 miles north of Seattle. Maybe we can meet sometime.

Sounds good. Picking up my wings on 9/22, so I'm sure I'm going to be posting more questions!