Feeling much better today (finally), and snuck in an hour to work on the plane.  I still haven't heard back from Van's Support on the email I sent from my April 12 faux pas, but I think they were probably out of the office due to Good Friday/Easter.  I'll check back with them this week if I don't hear from them early in the week.

Today I got the final steps on the initial assembly of the left horizontal stab complete.  Basically that meant drillint to final size / match drilling all the remaining holes on the skin, both sides. 

Once that's complete, you take the skin off... that's a LOT of clecos... and then repeat all I've been doing over the last couple months with the RIGHT hand stabilizer.  Here I am removing clecos with my air cleco remover.

 
All the clecos on one side removed, the skin pops open to reveal the inner skeleton structure.

 
A few minutes later, the skin and skeleton are free of each other.  The HS-404 in question (from 4-12) is laying on the rear spar channel, awaiting word from Van's.


When I first tried my air cleco tool, I thought it was too much trouble, and have been using the hand cleco pliers exclusively.  That makes sense for putting clecos in, but I now know the purpose of an air cleco tool:  when you have a lot of clecos to REMOVE (during disassembly) all at ONCE, then air cleco pliers are a fantastic time and arm saver!  See the short video below to see what I mean:



Can't see the video above? Download it (303 kb).