I realize I said I wasn’t going to do any fiberglass work, but I had some free time over the Veterans Day weekend and wanted to try start attaching the fairings. First off I focused on the elevator fairings. I had to trim off some of the fairing on the aft side so it would fit into the elevator and clear the trailing edge. I also had to sand down the flange a bit to get the fairing to basically sit flush. (I tried a few things to make a nice 90 degree joggle but honestly wasn’t able to do that very well a razor blade, Xacto knife, or files.)
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In the end I made the fairings fit as best as I could before I started following the instructions to drill out to #40. Cleaned and deburred everything, then final drill to #30. Once that was done, I started to trim the Horizontal Stabilizer fairings. followed the same process of trimming the flange back appropriately, and back the flange(and only the flange) so I could insert into the HS and it fit basically flush. I then match drilled everything to #40 and began to determine how to cut the fairing back. Goal was to remove just enough material so the elevator would swing freely.
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Basically this involved attaching the HS fairing and allowing the elevator to rest against the fairing so I could mark my sanding line. I did this on both sides, and slowly started to sand the fairing down using a perma-grit sanding block. Protip: Wear a dustmask and sand outside if possible. Wow this makes a lot of dust.
Many minor adjustments later and the Elevator was able to freely swing past the HS fairing. I would still have to sand it back further to get the minimum gap of 1/8″, but for now I left it alone.
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Next step was getting ready to install the Elevator Fairings with blind rivets. While there is no mention of using epoxy between the fairing and the Elevator when you blind rivet them together, I have seen a few articles and forum posts that highly encouraged it. Honestly I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t do this and mixed up a batch of Epoxy and Flox. This was then added to the fairing and inserted into the Elevator while wet and blind riveted with the CS4-4 rivets. Leftover Flox-Epoxy mix was then used between the fairing and elevators on the outside where there were minor gaps or imprefections (to be sanded down later) Weather was cold, so I ended up using my heater to keep the garage warm. Before I went to bed I let the garage get up to 90 degrees as I was not going to leave the heater unattended. Next morning the garage was still only at 60 degrees so I think my insulation did a good job. (It was below freezing that morning outside).
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With this done, I realized I really need to wait for warmer weather before I start to attach any additional fairings with epoxy or even start mixing Micro for the finishing of the fairing transitions.