First day of building the Sling 4!

Assembly: horizontal stabilizer

Manual ref: HS1

Today we opened up the empennage kit, we started by laying out all the components and checking if they were all shipped. Immediately we found out that the horizontal stabilizer skins were not shipped so they are being backordered which is a bummer.

To keep our workingspace organised we hung the small components, which are delivered in plastic bags, on a pegboard. The small brackets and ribs we put in a cupboard of which the planks are covered with a felt protection layer. The bigger components were layed out on the assembly tabels (also covered in the felt protection layer).

We also made a start with the first assembly step. First we removed the plastic, deburred the parts, cleaned them with simple green cleaner and primed the contact surfaces with Epifanes washprimer (recommended to us by our supervisor Jack Hoogewerff).

We decided to prime the contact surfaces because we think it is a necessary step to keep the plane operational for a long time (+10 years) especially since we are only 10/15 kilometers from the north sea. Before priming the parts we sanded some of the contact surfaces with 1200 grit sandpaper, later on we judged this to be too coarse (the scratching was too rough) and we switched to scotchbrite and the primer seems to hold nicely.

After the primer dried we started clecoing the horizontal stabilizer ribs to the spar as prescribed in HS1. We have not yet drilled the holes for the grommets, since we first want to do some testing to see what is the best hole size for these. 

Another thing that we skipped today is the electrical wire. The manual says it has to be 20AWG wire but we only received 18AWG and 22AWG, so we still have to figure out which wire is intended.

Builders of today:

- Pepijn van Kampen

- Tetsuo martynowicz

- Suzanne Hendriks

Supervisors of the building process:

- Jack Hoogewerff (NVAV)

- Martin van den Broek (NVAV)