Left elevator ready for riveting

Work and the Archer annual have been consuming most of my time recently. But I finally got the left elevator ready for riveting. One oops here…after riveting the ribs and one side of the spar, I realized that I’d forgotten to RTV the stiffener trailing edges.

There wasn’t enough space to get my hand inside the elevator, so I worked around it by taping a couple of soda straws together, squirting RTV in one end of the extended straw, and using an air chuck in the other end to blow the RTV out between the stiffeners. RTV is pretty messy stuff – I think I got more on me than I did in the elevator – but in the end it worked fine.

RTV...what a mess!