Category: Empennage

Building out the Empennage

Empennage Fairings – Part 2

Brian 0 Comment Fairings

After the last post, I completely disassembled my empennage and moved things around in the Garage.  I still have not hung the tailcone from the ceiling, but that is on my “to-do” list shortly as I need to make room for the Wings in early January (already got confirmation that I am scheduled for crating the first week of January!)  With everything put away we ended up having a few days of warmer weather so I took my elevators down to do a little more fiberglass work.

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Empennage Fairings – Part 1

Brian 0 Comment Fairings

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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Empennage Attach – Part 2

Brian 0 Comment Empennage Attach

I had been looking forward to this weekend for a while now.  This was the weekend when I finally attached the HS, VS, and Tailcone together for the first time and got to get a good look at what my airplane would look like!  (At least the back half!)

Leading up to this weekend I did a little pre-work on the pushrod, but never got enough time to get it primed (so didn’t rivet it together).

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Tailcone – Part 10

Brian 0 Comment Tailcone

This weekend I was able to get a friend of mine (Dan) to come over so I could rivet the aft top skin on the tailcone.  As he was doing me a favor, I was crawled into the tailcone with my backrivet set and gave him a backrivet bar to hold on the skin.  This was the first time I tried this method of backriveting, and honestly it worked really well!  Dan figured out the process really quick and was awesome in helping me get this beast riveted up.  I will say that being inside the tailcone and riveting overhead was hard on the arms, but not impossible.

I think there was a VAF post regarding how to protect the ribs when crawling into the tailcone, and honestly I thought I would put a piece of plywood or a 2×6 across all the ribs as a platform for me to sit on.  This was somewhat thwarted by where my stock lumber was and all the “stuff” in the garage at the moment.  I’m sure that would have worked (mostly), but that seemed like a lot of effort for a temporary platform.  Read more

Empennage Attach – Part 1

Brian 0 Comment Empennage Attach

Moving right along, I pull my horizontal stabilizer out of storage to begin getting everything ready to attach to the tailcone.  I’m skipping around a little bit on this due to the fact that the Tailcone doesn’t have the aft top skin riveted on yet.

The first challenge is how you need to bolt the HS to your bench to ensure that the elevator horns have sufficient room to move.  My benchtop doesn’t overhang so my first attempt wouldn’t let me move the elevators through their full motion.  I ended up screwing a piece of plywood to my benchtop with a good 1.5-2 foot overhang.  Even then, I had to have the HS overhang that by a bit to ensure that the elevator horns had sufficient travel.   Read more