Dave and Dave bending the left elevator skin

One of the nice things about RV building has been meeting other builders like Dave Rogers – he’s been helping my friend John Sannizzaro with his project. Dave is building a beautiful RV-8, and he kindly volunteered to show me the best way to bend elevator skins to the correct radius. Here we are using Dave’s bending brake to radius the left elevator skin.

Left elevator in brake

With the brake cranked down a bit, the left elevator has a nice trailing edge radius.

Get bent!

We followed the same process on the right elevator skin. Looks good! Dave bought CreativAir’s combination wingtip LED light/halogen landing light kit for his project. I hadn’t seen LED position lights before, so Dave hooked his up. Pretty freakin’ cool – I want a pair!

LED lights

Here’s the other side. You can see the circular cutout for a 75-watt halogen bulb.

More LED lights

Dave hooked the halogen landing light up; it puts out a lot of light. I’ll look forward to seeing how this installation works out.

Landing