Category: 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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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