Well I haven't been sittin here doing nothing since my last post.

Since I'm waiting for it to warm up before cutting the canopy I decided to mount the tail. Yesterday I finished mounting the horizontal stabilizer, it takes quite a bit of time to get the bolt holes just right but man they came out perfect, couldn't be happier with them.
After careful marking I used 12" drill bits starting with a #40 to get the initial hole. You can see I placed an engineering square next to the bit to make sure it was square with the fuse. This method works well. The final hole was drilled with a 3/16" reamer as it was just long enough to give drill head clearance.
20190414_135405 by
Jereme Carne, on Flickr
Here are the finished holes, you can see they are centered really well (as well as how far back the rivets are on the angle, not sure why Van's put them so far back but hey it works!), it also looks perfect underneath but I forgot to get pictures of this.
20190414_150206 by
Jereme Carne, on Flickr
Next I leveled the stab to the center section on the fuselage. This will ensure the stab is level with the wings. I found I needed an additional 0.040" shim on the right side under the bolts. I did expect this somewhat since I new the tail of the fuselage wasn't perfectly level when I built it, I spent many hours back then trying to remove any twist and I got it pretty dang close but not perfect. No big deal, Van's approved an extra shim and said it wouldn't be a problem.
20190414_215044 by
Jereme Carne, on Flickr
Here is the finished product with all the holes drilled. I'm very happy with how this came out. I was worried about drilling them notoriously difficult holes but it went smooth as butter. On to the VS next!
20190417_190330 by
Jereme Carne, on Flickr