Matt's RV-8 Project



Matt Dralle's RV-8 Project
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Date:  9-1-2008
Number of Hours:  4.00
Manual Reference:  
Brief Description:  Fiberglassing Empennage Tips - Part 1

I finished up glassing the Elevator tips and delved into gel-coating over the new fiberglass parts. Took a while to get the hang of it, but it works great now. The key is to not sand too hard on the fresh gel-coat as it sands off pretty easy. A couple of tries on the gel-coat and a couple of iterations with the primer-sanding-primer and the parts were looking pretty good. The tips for the Horz and Vert stab by default do not have a back end piece, so a great deal of the work involved using some hard foam and building a "dam" in the back and then fiberglassing both sides of the hard foam. I sanded out the back side and used some resin mixed with cotton powder and made a nice filler. This sanded down nice with the belt sander. The counterbalances for the elevators were done similarly, but required even more work because of the odd shapes. All-in-all, all of the tips and the tip installations came out really nice and I've very pleased. 9.5/10 All of the tips are put on with platenuts and screws that can be removed in the future if necessary. The plans call for riveting them all on, but this seems like a bad idea if you ever have to pull one off as the drilling out of the rivets is sure to ruin the paint. When the plane is painted, I will back all of the screws out about 1/8" so that the screws won't be painted in place and can then be backed in/out without damaging the skin paint. I'll have the paint shop paint a 100 or so extra screws so that I can replace any that become damaged over time.
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Fiberglassing

Fiberglassing

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Fiberglassing

Fiberglassing

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Fiberglassing

Fiberglassing

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