Unlike the rudder, which had pre-punched angle stock with notches for length and taper cuts (what a luxury!), the elevator skins don't come pre-punched. Nor does the angle stock for the elevator stiffeners. Finally some real work...just kidding. But you do have to measure everything out according to the plans. It's not rocket science, but you do have to be awake for this.
Here you can see the stiffener positions are measured and marked on the skin, and I've begun cutting the stiffeners out of the angle stock.
After over an hour of cutting, trimming, and shaping the stiffeners, the left elevator set is complete. Each stiffener has a 15-degree taper on the "fat" leading end, and then a 6" taper to an 1/8" radius at the trailing edge. Again, not rocket science, but a lot of cutting, grinding, and deburring.
Now comes the fun part...since none of this is pre-punched, you have to determine the best location for rivet holes. The plans call out the leading edge hole at roughly 1/4" from the leading edge, and the last hole 3/4" from the trailing edge. That's all well and good, but each stiffener needed its own custom rivet spacing. Fortunately I had just recently bought a rivet spacing fan from Avery, which came in really handy. I used it to mark evenly spaced rivet holes on the stiffeners. To make sure the holes were in a nice straight line, I used a "fence" on my drill press (actually just a small level clamped to the surface). I used the drill press to get the line of holes nice and straight. Otherwise, if I had hand-drilled these, the line probably would have zig-zagged a bit, and we don't need that if this is going to win Grand Champion (yeah, right).
After all the stiffeners were drilled, I positioned them on the skin and drilled through the skin.
I finished this process, then disassembled it, and I deburred and dimpled the stiffeners. I marked each stiffener with some light punch marks (which show up through the metal prep process and after having been primed) so that I'll be able to reposition the stiffeners in their correct respective spots.