Building the empennage

Dave and I started actually working on this in February 2002. We spent quite some time ‘pounding wood’ as Mike put it, making our 12’ x 4’ worktable. Having a table this big is really useful. Plenty of room and it’s good and sturdy.

The empennage is the biggest learning experience thus far, apart form maybe the electrical, which is about where I’m at as of this writing. We learned about metal forming, drilling, dimpling, rivetting. I’m amazed it turned out so well! We had our fair share of rivets that we had to drill out, but we managed to get through it unscathed! Apart from me drilliing Dave’s finger once!

Here’s the sketon all cleco’d together…

With some skins too. One thing that amazed me the most was how flimsy all this stuff was by itself, and how stiff it was when it was together!

The HS spar.. This was the first ever riveting we did.

Inside the HS. Looking at the shop heads…

Completed… Well, the metalwork anyways.

Here’s Dave… Looks to me like he be dimpling…

While I’m busy at it making stiffeners for the elevators and rudder.

Inside the VS… Why did I take these photos?! I’ve no idea!

Some elevator stiffeners I think… Could be rudder… I can’t remember.

The Grinch’s toe nail clippings…..

We thought we had an ingenious way to hold all the rivets in for backriveting the stiffners. Using masking tape… A piece for every rivet. Hmmm… Not sure if this added time or took it away! Anyways, I know my finger were getting sore pulling the tape off after we’d done riveting…

So we enlisted help…. Toon and Steve! Thanks guys!

We’ve opted to go electric trim for both elevator and ailerons…

Of course I had to try it out… It’s nice to see stuff moving…

The trim tab was my second attempt after screwing up the first one. This was a tricky thoing to get right. I wanted to get the gap perfect all the way around in relation to the elevator….. It came out pretty good. I used a rivet gun to beat down the ends over the traditional wedge block arrangement I’ve seen on so many sites…

Ahhh yes, fibreglass… I kinda like working this stuff. It’s great, apart from the sanding. I hate sanding. I know I’m going to have plenty of sanding to do…. This metal aeroplane sure has a lot of fibreglass parts! Here I’m covering the counterbalances..

The fuselage trying on the tail for size… Fits nice!