The weather has turned here - Autumn now - 12 degrees and raining today. So I made the decision to close up the garage door and insulate it again for the winter. So this means an end to the work on the tail till next summer. Slightly frustrating not to have closed this out before Autumn but anyway - it will keep.
This week I've worked on the horizontal stabs - putting the ribs in place on the root end.
Before doing this I spoke to Pete about how to fix the securing pin in with flock - a bit of a mystery as to how to surround the pin in flock when it is inaccessible inside the rib. Pete solved the mystery by letting me know that he builds a little 'cave' of polystyrene inside the stab. Then when the rib is bonded in and the hole drilled for the pin - mix up some slightly runny flock and pour that into this cavity. Obviously when the stab is put on the spar tube to position the pin it will have to be done one at a time so that the stab is 'downhill' and this will stop the flock running out.
I also thought it a good idea to make up some other small blocks of polystyrene and fix those in with 5 min Araldite too. This makes life easy to fit the ribs at the right distance - 10mm as it happens. This is well worth doing as I found it to be a big help.
You can also see that I put some aluminium tape on the inside of the spar tube to protect it from any resin or flock that may have got on there from bonding in the ribs.
Slightly disappointed to find that the rear ribs were well short of filling their space - see photo below. This is surprising as my kit is No.28 and you'd think that the factory would have these types of things sorted by now?
Anyway I fixed this by cutting out a small filling piece of carbon. I also filed down the edge at an angle and did the same (opposite angle) to the larger rib - this made a kind of mitre joint which made sure the small filler rib sat flush with the larger one.
I'm thinking maybe next week I'll start on the elevator drive hex's. These are fiberglass and bonded into the elevators. They then slide over the metal hex's I have already fitted to the elevator drive tube.
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| Polystyrene 'cave' for retaining pin flock. |
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| More polystyrene to hold ribs in correct level. |
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| Rib falls well short of space. |
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| Space filled in with carbon. |
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| Ribs bonded in with flock and tape |
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