16 Nov 2017

Vertical Stabilizer

 Here I am, showing off the fruits of my labor..... before I have to tear it all apart again to debur! Here is the frame of the Vertical Stabilizer (VS) all Cleco'd together. After making the mistake of drilling a hole to the wrong size in the initial Rear Spar, my re-ordered parts arrived today and I began working with earnest!

The skin wasn't as difficult as I had imagined it would be, but it wasn't exactly easy either. The holes in the skin seemed to be just a smidge smaller than the clecos and I had to put a little more elbow grease into putting them in place than I had expected.

So, it has been about 2 weeks since I have received the empennage kit. I haven't been able to work on the plane nearly as much as I would have liked, due to a massive "honey do" list for thanksgiving. I have been working on things here and there for about 5 minutes at a time, until I got caught and had to go back to work!

I had completed the first step of attaching the plate doubler to the forward VS spar and then started working on the rear spar. That is where I made my mistake! I misread the instructions and drilled the wrong hole too large in the rudder hinges. Unfortunately in my zest, I also drilled in to the rear spar and therefore opted to re-order both pieces. The process took about 4 business days to arrive, but once they got here, I snuck in to the workshop (garage) and began work!

The process isn't too terrible, although there are a few spots to make sure you read over a few times before commencing. There is a note on the bottom rudder hinge about not final drilling two corner holes. I am unsure at his point as to whether or not that is speaking to two of the three pre-drilled holes, or if, like the upper bottom hinge piece, the two corner holes that it refers to are drilled in later and that all three pre-drilled holes need to be final drilled along with everything else. I figure that I will wait to drill those as they will be very accessible later on when I figure it out. (the bolt holes don't get drilled in until the VS is attached to the cone, from what I could tell)

I'm looking forward to more days like today, where I am able to get a significant amount of work done in little time. This took me just about 2 hours worth of work, most of which was reading and re-reading the instructions!

Some of you may notice that I have removed all of the bluing. I have decided that since the whole airplane will be scuffed significantly when it goes to paint, I am not going to worry about protecting the skins with the bluing. I figure any scratches that would be deeper than what they will do at paint would probably damage the skin the same with or without the bluing. The benefit being that I have heard in more than one blog that the bluing just gets harder and harder to take off the longer that it is in place.