I had the old but never used white fairings from the old empennage I got with my wings back in the day. These are 2007 vintage white gel coat instead of the gray ones that Vans currently ships, although they are the same part number. They're quite a bit thinner layups than the gray ones, so a little less robust, but I weighed them on my postal scale this morning and discovered that cumulatively, they are a bit more than 7 oz lighter than the comparable ship set of gray ones. Save half a pound of the tail of the airplane? heck yeah! Thats the c.g. equivalent of deleting about 120 inch lbs off the aft c.g. So after that revelation, I fit and started closing out the V.S. tips. I cut foam plugs, recessed them about .25" into the tips and filled in the recess with a couple of layers of fiberglass for a base and then slathered in an epoxy/flox mixture thickened with cabosil to make it peanut butter consistency. I protected the v.s. with waxed packing tape so I can get this apart again for finishing. Tomorrow I'll pop this out, and sand the plug flush. I'll then dissolve the foam with acetone and add a couple plies to the inside to make sure it stays put. One thing that would ruin your day real quick is if this came loose and jammed the elevators. I then moved on to the the elevator tips. Task one was something I've been meaning to get to for a while, which was to install the trim motor in the left elevator. This seemed like a good day to knock this out so that the trim tab wasn't flopping around while I was manipulating the elevator while working on the fiberglass tip. No surprises here, other than it seemed like at full extension the pushrod might rub on the slot where it passes through the skin, so I lengthened the slot about 1/2" with a chainsaw file. There's a big doubler on the back side of this area so as long as you don't get into a rivet edge distance problem you have some liberty in this area. The number 24 wires coming off the servo are too small to use most "normal" splices here, so I used high density d-sub pins covered in heat shrink and covered the wire in abrasion sleeve (snakeskin) These pins are only semi-permanent in that you can shave the heat shrink off of them and get it all apart again if the servo ever needs to be replaced, but the plan is to run the other end of that wire into the tailcone where it will connect to a normal d-sub connector. If the elevator ever needs to come off you can unplug it under the empennage fairing rather than having to remove the trim motor and fiddle with it down there. One that was done, I started working on the tips. I trimmed and match drilled the white tip fairings then just eyeballed what made sense for closing out the forward end. I shaved down the lead counterweights so that they were recessed all around what I envisioned the tip profile to be by about 1/16" on the front face and a bit more around the inner radius of the fiberglass. I did all this shaping with a coarse file and checked often to make sure I wasn't removing too much lead and that they were still nose heavy. Once I was happy with everything, I prepped the inner face of the fiberglass tip by coarse sanding it to give the epoxy something to bite into, then mixed up some thick epoxy/flox and slathered a generous coat onto the sides of the lead counterweight and installed the fiberglass onto it so I have a thick buildup between the two. I had already cut a couple of layers of cloth slightly larger than the face of the counterweight, so now I installed these as a wet layup and tucked the edges into the previously buttered edge gap with a popsicle stick and then finished off by covering the whole thing with more flox/epoxy. The idea is that the entire tip including counterweight is now all bonded together. Once it dries, I can sand it down to final shape and have lots of thickness left due to my previous shaping of the counterweight. once this is sanded to more or less final shape I may decide to cover the whole thing with another ply on the outside just for added insurance, but I don't see how it can go anywhere. If something cracks loose at some point in the far distant future it still can't go anywhere due to the squeeze out aft of counterweight. It was a long day in the shop, yet somehow I neglected to take many pictures of the process. Hopefully this description might help somebody in the future.