Finished horizontal stabilizer

06/12/2009

Empennage

Finished with the tail section. I decided to not put the hardware on the horizontal stabilizer like I did with the vertical stabilizer. I had too many issues and I'm going to wait until I assemble the tail to the fuselage. I spent this weekend cleaning up some little issues with the other parts of the tail. Mostly, re-gluing gussets and such. One issue that I noticed was that the vertical stabilizer and the rudder were off horizontally about a 1/4”. I glued a scrap piece of lattice on top of the rudder and sanded it down to line up with the vertical stabilizer. I also reinforced some of the ribs and diagonals that look loose with extra glue. IMHO, the elevator looks the best by far. In hind sight (and when making replacement parts in the future), I'd recommend to use a jig. I'd take the drawing and lay it out on the sheet of plywood to work on. Then, take blocks of wood and jig up where the ribs and spars are to go. The leading edge curved a bit (about a 1/4” over 5’) and I had to fight that when gluing. I feel a jig would solve this by holding the parts together while I glued them together. Another thing I'd do differently would be to order spruce from Spruce Aircraft. I didn't save a lot of money by using local wood (.72/ft. at Spruce Aircraft compared to .69/ft. at Home Depot) and I had to do extra researching and testing to feel comfortable with the yellow pine I used which was time and worry I didn't have to go through. For the record, the difference in the breaking is the spruce breaks at about 100 lbs. and stays together when suspension force is applied to the broken wood and the yellow pine breaks at a higher weight [more force need to break the sample wood of about 150lbs] and is more catastrophic [broke completely apart]. I was testing sheer force only and not compression or suspension.