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Peters Web Site
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Date: 6-21-2020
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Number of Hours: 5.00
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Manual Reference: 9225501-LOG-03.138
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Brief Description: Empennage Fairing
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Today I started work on fitting the fibreglass empennage fairing by first trimming it back to it's final shape. It comes oversize, with marks scratched into the surface to indicate where it needs to be trimmed to. No pictures, but I carefully trimed using my trusty Dremel, then sanded all the edges smooth.
Since there's no pre-drilled holes in the fairing then I needed to match drill to the underlying nutplates. Hmmm, how do we do this? I first thought I might be able to place a bright light underneath, and mark the holes from the top that way, but this didn;t work out as good an idea as it sounded. I then reverted to simply marking a line to each hole on the skin, and placed a cross mark at exactly one inch from the hole centre. With the fairing in place I then simply extended the line onto the fibreglass, and marked back one inch from my cross mark, and drilled. This worked quite well.
With the holes drilled I then countersunk to suit a tinneman washers and screwed the fairing down. I've just done the right side for now. The left side is going to be a problem, I can tell, as the fairing doesn't want to sit snuggly against the vertical stabiliser, and I just know I'm going to have some horrible gaps. Even on the side that I've done already I can see an unsightly gap that has formed toward the leading edge of the horizontal stabiliser (bottom picture below). I'm thinking there's going to be some fibreglass/resin work necessary to get a nice gap-free finish. For now though< i;m just going to get the fiaring fitted and move on.
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The empennage fairing, half fitted
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How I match drilled the fixing holes
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Not particularly pleased with the gap, as seen here
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