Today I headed down to the shop to finish the reassembly of the horizontal stabilizer. When Scott was here yesterday he asked if it was necessary to put the assembly in a jig to ensure it was straight. I told him it wasn't, but it got me wondering how straight the assembly would be without using a jig. I decided to make a couple brackets and check for twist using the "fishing line at each end" method. Initially there was about 5/32 twist along the length. Well even though the front spar was riveted, I decided to wrench on the assembly some to see if I could improve the situation. After much pulling, the twist was reduced to about 3/32. However I found that when I started installing some rivets in the rear spar that almost all of that went away. I'm left with only about 0.015 twist across the full span. Sweet. I guess sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

Some time later I finished up reassembly of the HS including installing and torqueing the bearing.

When I see this photo it reminds me of that show, The Six Million Dollar Man. You know..."We can rebuild it. We have the technology. Better than before. Better, stronger, faster."

;-)