I got my hinge arms out and gave them a clean up and de-burred them. I had to cut down the oilite bearings as I thought that I had ordered the 0.125 in length bearings but they came 0.375 long. So I used the lathe to shorten them.
I would have liked to have alodined the hing arms after I had fit and tested my elevators but as I had to press the bearings in I was forced to alodine them first.
I didn’t want to open the slots in the glass until I had done all my filling on them so I poked a small hole through the glass so I could locate them after they were filled.
I then sanded the glass to expose the slot in the inserts.
I used only clamps to hold my templates as I wanted to check my travel before I committed to bonding the hinge arms in.
With the elevators temporarily clamped in place I used the hinge arms to mark out where the canard will be cut. I made the slot only 0.125 wide for testing purposes. I used some CA to hold them in place while I checked my travel of the elevator.
Using the templates to position the elevators I ended up with close to 0.2 clearance. If I had not pre-filled the surfaces of the canard and the elevators I defiantly would not have been able to meet that dimension.
After I had the first slot to the correct location I used my contour template to mark transfer its location to the other hinge locations
Here is a pic of using the template to mark to length of the slot.
I repeated the same procedure to the other side.
With the hinge arms temporarily held in place with some CA I made sure I have the required travel.
I opened the slots to 0.25 wide and used an endmill to remove the high density core from the canard.
After I was happy with the testing I used bondo to hold the jigs in place. Its like Brylcreem “a little dab’ll do ya” 🙂
Here is a pic with the jigs in place.
I put some flox into the openings on the canard. I also brushed some straight resin onto the hinge arms
I used a mixing stick to tool the flox into the core. I wanted to be sure that the flox was going to bond to the core as well as it could.
I sanded the hinge arms on the surface that would be bonded in the flox.
I also used 0.20 shims to ensure clearance in the gap.
The slots for the hinge arms were then injected and filled with flox. I would like to tell you that this went smoothly for me but that would be a lie. I actually ended up taking the elevators back off to wipe up the flox that had oozed out will injecting it in. The next time around went better probably because I had practice.
Here is a pic of everything in place and curing.
Canadian long-ez 