Building a plane sometimes means you goof…you drill a hole in the wrong place, bend a rivet, make a ding in a skin or some such misadventure. It happens, the thing you need to do is recognize it and fix it. Glossing over it is not a proper choice when building an aircraft.
Repairing can mean simply buying new parts and building that section over again or sometimes it means a repair. The proper means to repair aircraft are documented in a publication of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) entitled; Aircraft Inspection, Repair & Alterations: Acceptable Methods, Techniques, and Practices, publication AC 43.13.
My current goof wasn’t a bad one, it was just ulgy work and I decided that the cosmetic flaw didn’t belong on my airplane. In the photo below you can see two small tabs that need to be bent over by hammering them over the wooden form to overlap and make the inner edge of the trim tab on the left elevator.
In forming the bend I scratched the metal and the bend wasn’t crisp or well done. So I elected to fix this by first removing the tabs and making a rib to fit into the end in their place. Below are photos of the trimming and finishing of the tabs and of the rib I made to fit. More pictures and descriptions later as I make the final fitting and drill it.
Here is the rib I made to take the place of the tabs.
