Day 178

Today we worked on getting the empennage dry fitted. We first took some time to finish prepping the vertical stabilizer for paint. We hand only finished filling about half of the rivets with body filler, and had not sanded any of them yet. So we got that finished and final scuffed the whole part. We also drilled some holes that will hold the wiring in place later at final assembly.

We also finished routing and tieing up the wires in the tail. There was a little excess because we were unsure of how everything wires up when we first ran the wires to the back. Well, we definitely had enough. That’s alright, we made it all work. We also added a second hole for the beacon light wire to pass through from the vertical stabilizer that is now next to the VOR antenna cable. We felt this would be a better place to run the wire, rather than down through the center of the horizontal stabilizer. We also drilled a hole on the back near the top that will hold the plug at the top on the inside of the stabilizer, keeping it held out of the way.

After all this prep work on the vertical stabilizer we then mounted and bolted first, the horizontal stabilizer, the the Elevator. Next we bolted on the vertical stabilizer and then the rudder onto the back of that. We then unwrapped and mounted the Empennage Fairing. Lastly we placed the empennage control covers on. When we held these up we noticed there were two pairs of rivets that were not meant to have been pulled, but rather where meant to be rivet nuts. We went back and checked, and found that there had been a new page added to the manual. Back when we built this section we were not yet in the habit of checking the updated manual. (Rather didn’t know it could be looked up yet. Haha) Oh well. It is an easy fix. We marked them so that when we dismantle everything again, before paint, we can drill them out and insert M4 rivet nuts.

Now that we have the empennage bolted on we can move onto getting the fairing fitted properly and get mounting holes measured and drilled and then insert M4 rivet nuts for it as well