What's this!?  Yeah, had some minor foundation problems... the portion of the foundation along the garage started to settle a bit.  The house foundation is perfectly level and fine, but the garage is tilting foward (must be those heavy aluminum airplane parts--NOT).  As it sinks slowly at the front, this brick you see here was pulling the brick above the doorway AWAY from the house, because there is no expansion or relief joint; this brick is tied in with the brick on the front of the house.  So as this wall was slowly sinking, it acted as a giant level to pull the brick wall away from the main house... OUCH!  I had a brick guy come out a couple months back and they cut a relief slot to stop the movement, and fixed the house brick.  The foundation people came today to raise the garage foundation back up, and close the gap in the new expansion joint.

We have the worst soil where we live.  Hard gooey clay.  Bad for foundations.  While we enjoy plants, digging in our yard is no fun.  The few times I've had to dig a hole in our yard, it was torture.  So I was surprised at how fast this crew dug, by hand, HUGE deep holes (4 of them) along this wall and back under the foundation.  They pounded piers into the ground with a hydraulic ram.  It was strange to see the whole garage moving up and down a few inches at a time.... that thing had some POWER.   (I moved airplane parts under my workbenches to protect them should anything fall off walls, but no such problems occurred).

 

The crew had to cut a sprinkler line, so they ran to the hardware store and fixed it while they were there.

OK, they are done with their work... back to building an airplane!  Here you see the two HS-702 front spars for the horizontal stabilizer (in blue plastic) and the HS-710 and HS-714 aluminum angle that will form stiffener bars at the center section.   If you look closely at the two spars, you'll see that each has a tab or tongue at one end, where the flange has been cut back by the factory.  Those two tabs butt up flush with each other, and the two stiffener bars are mounted at that section to keep the whole assembly stiff.

The stiffener bars have to be tapered at the ends by hand.  The plans call for you to make a 1/4" radius curve at the end... at first, I used my ruler to mark 1/4" out from the center of the hole at several points, then "connected the dots".  But a quick look around the shop found that of of my flush rivet squeezer sets was exactly the right size.  Placed it over the hole, traced a line around it with the blue Sharpie, and viola!!

Here's a quick shot of how the ribs and nose ribs will lay out in the horizontal stabilizer.  You can see that the front "tapers" back from the center towards the edges....  to accomplish that, the two stiffeners you saw above have the tapered ends bent back at a 6-degree sweep.  The two tabs you saw above are straight, then the rest of the spar sweeps back outboard of that center section.

After some rough cuts...