Tailcone Start

This is the last assembly of the tail kit.  Construction usually takes around 100 hours going by what I see others have done online.  I'm heavily loaded on our house remodel too, so I expect this one to take a while.

The next kit is the wings, and they take 6-8 weeks from order to arrival so I'll be placing that order hopefully this summer yet.

At first, most of what you do is prepare the bulkheads, stiffeners, and longerons.  Its quite a bit of bandsaw work, drilling, sanding and deburring.  You have to mark a line down the length of all the J-channel stiffeners.  There's a lot of them so I made a little template to hold the marker as I slide it down.



The longeron bending was a little scary at first, but I picked it up quick.  You put some stiff pieces of angle aluminum in a vice and whack it with a hammer to get a slight bend, about 2 degrees.  I went nice and slow and got a bend that was just right on both.



Then you put the bottom tailcone skin upside down on some saw horses and start putting the bulkheads on the skin.  I don't have tall sawhorses so I improvised with some 2x6s fastened to the benches.


A small GOTCHA here.  I put the bottom skin on my "saw horses" in the wrong direction here.  This has the left side open to the outside, the plans ask for access to the right side first.  It won't matter if you are on real sawhorses or just keep it in mind when labeling parts L/R.

Elevators Finished

I didn't do a good job of keeping this up to date because along with the plane, we've started a massive remodel of our house.  Its pretty much mandatory when you build a plane.  You have to either move 3 times or remodel, is what other builders tell me.

Insides primed all nice:





This is the hole where the trim cable passes through



For the trim tabs, you cut out some foam ribs.  You'd be surprised how rigid this stuff is.



Bending the edges of the trim tabs is pretty tricky.  I'd grade mine average at best.  Went with a trick I found online where you take a flat piece of bar steel and sharpen the end to fit up into the trim tab bend.  Clamp it all down to the bench and bend with the hammer.  It didn't slip, but it didn't get the most crisp edge either.






I did have one GOTCHA.  I riveted the trim tab horns on first, then tried to rivet the bottom skin to the spar.  Nope, won't work.  The tab covers the last rivet hole just enough to make it impossible to set properly.



And done.  My buddy Mike says the elevators are "tricky".  I'd have to agree.

Elevators I

Before even starting these I made an ass outta myself.  Looked at these parts and thought, "why the hell did Van's send me used crap?  The had scuff marks, ugly bends, already dimpled, no blue plastic.



Wrote them an email asking for new not used parts, and got this friendly reply:

Most empennage ribs have strait bends so we can use 2024-T3 (hard) aluminum with blue vinyl. But if rib has compound curves, we must use 2024-T0 (soft) aluminum. If it’s (soft) aluminum it must go through a heat treating process after we press the part. We can’t use the blue vinyl with 2024-T0 (soft) aluminum because it will clog up the punch press and it won’t survive the heat from heat treating. When we punch parts without the blue vinyl It will have some small scratches in the part, so we use scotch bright pad to clean it up. The slight bend in the side of the part number E-903 is intentional to accommodate the overlap of the skins. You will see this on page 9-2 and 9-9 of the plans.

So ok... I'll carry on, hat in hand.

This is basically what you get after finishing the first page.  Counterweight ribs assembled and ribs cut out and cleco'd together.



The four skins are identical between left/right but unique top to bottom.  You have to bend some tabs, and the direction they bend determines which side they fit on.  Took my time with that, I could see it would be easy to mess up.

Horizontal Stabalizer

The HStab is finished after 87.3 hours.  This is where you start to grasp just how many freakin' rivets are in this plane.  The HStab itself is 11, maybe 12' wide and has close to 1000 holes.

The local EAA tech counceler Tom Olson stopped by to do a final inspection on this piece.  I had been reading some forums online where they showed some super poor examples of riveting in aircraft that were flying.  They hadn't crashed which speaks to the design of this plane, but they wouldn't have withstood the 6g design limits either.  So that scared me into thinking I need an experienced eye looking at my work before I moved on.  Tom had all good things to say, and even wondered if I had done metal work before.  We had a long conversation about his days working in my department 35 years ago.


Here's the front spar, doubler and attachment brackets on.



You use some of the longest rivets in the kit on these parts.



I'm slowly working the kids up to the point where they can make a meaninful contribution.  Here's Sawyer doing an excellent job of deburring a rib flange (aka flossing the teeth)



And some not-so-constructive playing toy swords with some stiffeners:



I let Sawyer come "help" me one day after his nap, he spent 45 minutes making a rough draft of the aircraft's paint design.



Here is first assembly/match drilling.  There's only clecos in half the holes.



The ribs after disassembly, ready for priming.  Just scrubbing these down in preparation for priming took the better part of an hour.



Dimpling the skins.  I really like my setup with just having the dimple die a little above table height to allow for the carpet.  Only thing I may change is to back it up a bit as its difficult to get some edge holes dimpled when the piece has to mostly hang off the front of the workbench.



Sawyer came in after a nap one afternoon and watched Ice Age.



Then helped me dimple, except he whacked the handle one time when he wasn't supposed to and made the first boo-boo on my skins.  Its not bad, and its on the bottom of the HStab so nobody will know.



Assembly starts with attaching ribs and the stiffeners to the rear spar.



Darn fine rivets if I may say so myself.  Sure love that pneumatic squeezer.



Dad helped for a few days when I was on vacation.



The finished product.  Whew that was a big one!