Category: Horizontal Stabilizer

HS Skins Riveted

After coming back from a long Memorial Day Weekend trip to Sedona, AZ, I finished riveting the skins on this weekend. About 500 rivets in total. The trickiest part was (again) getting the holes in the skin lined up just right with the holes in the ribs and channels...

Skin on HS

After having to slightly modify my priming process yet again (story for another post), I started clecoing the skins onto the HS frame. First side goes on pretty easily… …But when flipping over to the other side, it’s a tight fit, and initially the holes don’t line up since...

Progress on Horizontal Stabilizer

I got most of the horizontal stabilizer assembled this past weekend, save for the skins. Everything went together fine. I learned it’s a little tricky to get holes lined up just right for all the rivets to fit – especially when lining up overlapping parts with many holes, like...

Process Makes Perfect

After about 2 days of drying, my freshly-primed parts for the horizontal stabilizer started showing spider lines in the paint, then flaking off and looking like this horror: It took me a while to figure out what went wrong, but it looks like I failed to properly clean the...

First set of parts primed and ready

I spent another two hours last night prepping the last of the horizontal stabilizer parts (minus skins) and then priming them. Primer appears to have adhered well to the aluminum. Gonna need to refine my spraying technique though – I went through a whole 15.5 oz can spraying 3...

Work commenced on Horizontal Stabilizer

This weekend I completed inventory of both kits I received, so it was time to get started! The first assembly in the manual is the horizontal stabilizer. I’ve spent the last two days deburring and cleaning all the parts, and then will be priming them in a little “paint...