Title: continued empennage fairings
Pulled the HS tips off and sanded them more of less flat with a 1/4 sheet vibrating sander with 60 grit. Then trial fit everything back together with clecoes and measured to make sure I was in the ballpark of the specified 1/8" gap between teh elevator counterweight horns and the h/s tips. Once I was happy with everything, I sanded the hardened flox to about 1/32-1/16 below the surface and them filled it back in with a skim coat of micro epoxy. Tip- Flox is harder than nails. If you try to hand sand that stuff it will take all day. since in this case I just needed it to be slightly concave, but not really precise, I sanded it down with a small flapper disk on a dremmel tool. It seems like I could combine a coupe of steps here, so when I did teh V/S tip I did it a bit differently. I formed teh plug with a built in chamfer for flox so that if everything when were it was supposed to with no voids I wont need second step of additional plies on the inside once I melt the foam out. Because of the shape of the foam plug, I was able to lay bead of flox about 3/8" deep recessed from the face. I them imbedded 4-5 plied of scrap glass I the flox on the face of the foam plus, taking care to ensure it was imbedded in the fillets/beads at the perimeter. The glass was literally just what I had laying in my scrap box and varied from 4oz to 10 oz. Because of the way I'm making this, they are just flat plies so literally anything would have worked here. After that, I skimmed in a top layer of micro and set it aside to dry along with the h/s tips. The elevator balance weight closeouts appeared that they were going o work, So I went ahead and riveted the tips to the elevators. The holes for this are pre drilled in the elevator skins and you just have to match drill the fiberglass. which I has already done, but I discovered that the two aft rivets are so close together taht after you get they first one in, teh tail prevents you from getting tiger opposite one inserted far enough to pull it. Fortunately teh CS4 rivets that are called out have a huge grip range. I reasoned that they were actually longer than needed for the grip thats required in this application, and a bit of testing and experimentation proved that to be true. I was able to know the mandrel out of one shorten it about 1/16" on the 3M wheel, then reinstall the mandrel. That made it short enough to mostly seat in the hole. As I pulled it, I was able to seat it before it swelled enough to lock in the hole. Once that was assured, I did a top coat of epoxy micro on those as well and will come back and sand this all at once. I spent some Tim after working on the rudder caps. The top cap is fitting pretty ell, but it's about 1/4" too short on the trailing edge. I know it would fly fine that way, but it's right at eye level when you walk around the airplane and it's just not aesthetically pleasing. I think my choices are going to be building this up and making it longer, or maybe just going with the gray gelcoat tips in this one area because I know that it's a bit longer. Will think on this on Monday.


NOTE: This information is strictly used for the EAA Builders Log project within the EAA organization.     -     Policy     -     © Copyright 2024 Brevard Web Pro, Inc.