Category: Empennage

It’s been a little bit since I’ve been able to work on my plane – work has been busy (including an overnight trip), but I’ve also been taking advantage of the nice weather lately, doing some outdoors stuff  like biking, hiking & pool days. I spent about an hour...

Good productive weekend! I primed and started assembly of the elevator, starting with the trim tab. I ran into a hole misalignment with rib #1 on both sides, looks like other builders have encountered this too. I decided to use a #20 drill bit to fix this – the...

This seemed to be much easier than filing down 26 rivets...

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...

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...

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...

I decided on the RAMI AV-12 antenna to mount inside the VS. This antenna is optional, however I plan to fly IFR and want to be able to fly ILS approaches, which, for the moment, are still pretty common. It was hard to decide which antenna to get, but...

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...

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...

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...