Final bending and match drilling elevator skins

The bends put into the elevator skins were close to where they needed to be, but they still needed some persuasion. Each skin needs to be flat from the spar to the start of the radius on the trailing edge, and mine were both still a bit ballooned. At first I tried using the small oak bending tool with some pliers to bend the trailing edges more, but it didn't seem to be making much of a difference. Either I wasn't using enough force or the tool just wasn't working very well.

It frustrated me for a bit before I read somewhere on the forums about using a hand seamer here instead. I put some duct tape on my hand seamer to keep it from scratching the skins and I tried it out. Starting at one end I carefully worked my way down the trailing edge of the right elevator, squeezing every inch or two at a time to ensure the bend stayed consistent. Lo and behold, it worked!

A word of caution, it may work too well. It's easy to put a lot of force into a smaller area than the wood bender, thus it's easy to overbend the skin in some places.

A little overdone here...

It takes some trial and error to figure out how much force is necessary, but I was eventually able to (mostly) get a consistently flat skin on each elevator. It's not 100% perfect but it will be easy to make any necessary adjustments even after the airplane is flying.

Just about perfect!

With the bending pretty much done, I clecoed the skeleton into place on each elevator and match drilled all the holes.