Taking another stab at it

With the vertical stab installed, there's one more to go: the horizontal stab. But before that could be done, the rudder needed to be installed on the VStab. This was made more difficult by the newly tall and increasingly inconvenient VStab. The only way to reach the top hinge was to use the new scaffold.

Cadillac Pete showed up just in time to help me install the rudder (it wasn't going very well as a one-man job) and to help get the HStab ready to mount.

The bolts that hold in the counterbalance arm have to be removed and the arm twisted 90 degrees in its mount to allow the weights to fit through the aft bulkhead.

The fit through the slot easily.

I marked the arm to help me remember which way to turn it in order to get it back to its original orientation. Yes, it matters.

Putting in the bolts to hold the stab in place turned out to be slightly more difficult that it initially appeared. I thought it lucky that the washers that I had super glued into place almost two years ago were still holding, but it turned out that the glue bond had grown brittle and fragile in the intervening months as had, truth be told, my patience when it comes to super glue in general. As soon as we tried to get the flanges with the washers glued to them into position, the washers broke loose. That led to a trip to Lowes where I found a new package design for Super Glue: four single-use tubes instead of the normal larger tube that ends up being a de facto higher cost single-use package since the unused portion inevitably hardens in the tube before I get around to needing it again.  Maybe I will find super glue to be more tolerable now.

Once the washers were glued back onto the flanges, it was relatively easy to get the stab bolted into place.