| July 10, 2007 |
| Horizontal Stabilizer |
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| OK... went to our EAA chapter Fly-In and was able to look at 2 Sonex tails. Their horizontal FG tips looked pretty straight. I will need to take mine back off and find out what I did wrong. This is where I left off last time. I had everything drilled out again thinking I was closer to finishing these things, that is when I noticed my aft portion of my FG tips were not straight across, horizontally. My frustration level was very HIGH! These tips were, by far, my worst nightmare. |
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| This is the aft portion I am talking about. Here it looks straight across, but it is not. We think we know what we did wrong. There is a rib that goes inside this aft portion of the FG tip. We manipulated this rib (when drilling it to the FG tip) so it would line up with the edge of the FG (thinking we could get out of sanding it later). Well, in doing so, it caused the aft portion to twist. Lesson learned! |
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| Filled up the holes with Marine-Tex (bondo-type stuff). Did not have to fill all the holes, just the top four on one tip, and the whole top row on the other. |
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| Since I had already drilled my hole in the rib ( under the FG), I used a hole finder to locate my holes. This time making sure the rib is in a position were everything will maintain a straight horizontal plane when finished. |
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| One tip is finished and looks pretty good. There is a lot of drying time involved with the Marine-Tex filler, along with some sanding afterwards. This is all I got done today. |
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| Pic of the part in question... it looks pretty straight across now. |