horizontal stabilizer

I've just finished the HS skeleton and am having trouble fitting the skin. The plan says I should have a 1/2 inch overhang on the rear skin aft of the back edge of the rear spar. Try as I may I can only get 1/4 inch on the inboard side. Plenty of overhang out board.

Any suggestions?

have you tried using ratchet straps to pull the skin down more?

WID - Horizontal Stab

I just went out and looked at mine (hanging from the ceiling - built a couple of years ago) and I had (at most) 3/16" overhang at the inboard location and 1/4" at the outboard end. Yes - this is significantly less than called for in the plans, the "scaled" callout on Drwg. 15 is approx 3/8" at the root and 5/16" at the tip. But what you don't find out until later is that you have to trim back the overhang to allow the up/down movement of the elevator to the design specs + a bit of clearance for convenience. I think you will find (when you get there), that some of the original trailing edge will need to be removed to allow the correct rotation of the elevators. I remember the "cutting and fitting" process, and when I got it where it needed to be, what I had left was about 3/16 & 1/4.

YMMV

David Howe
RV-4 S/N 1136 Built - 1600 Hr. flown - Sold
HR II S/N 002 Built - 900+ Hr
RV-3 S/N 11226 Jigging up Fuselage

HS Skin overhang

Have a close look at dr.# 15 top left ( section ELEVATOR LEADING EDGE DETAIL) there you see the overhang over the HS-303 flange, root and tip.
I also believed to have a problem fitting the skin because I thought the hingeline (11/4 from the HS-303 web) in the drawing represents the overhang. NO it' wrong.
Finally i did it with the overhang from the detail section mentioned above. It worked fine.
Let me know if it works for you.

Peter

Thanks for the iformation.

My building space temporarily disappeared so the project is on hold for now but thank you all for your input. I found since the original post that I needed to do a bit more to rib flanges and lubricated the inside of the skins. I plan to put it back on the jig and be satisfied with what I get.