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COLIN'S WEB SITE
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Date: 11-4-2011
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Number of Hours: 0.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: The Empennage Saga
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So, I purchaces my wing and empannage kits second-hand. Very little work had been done to the wings, but the empennage was complete. I never thought the emp I bought was perfect, but it looks decent at the time. Fast-forward a couple of years. I am at the point where I need to fit the emp to the fuselage for rigging the controls. I take another look at the emp with more educated eyes and find there are a lot of problems. Too many for me to ignore. I decide to replace the whole thing.
So, after some digging around I find a RV-7 emp for sale. It is not local so I review many pictures. The pictures look good, so the seller and I make a deal. When I received the Emp, I found that the picture did not show the build quality very well. I inspect the emp and it is just plain bad. I was hard pressed to find anything on the tail done correctly. There was no edge-finishing done, even on the spar parts. The ribs were countersunk rather than dimpled. The rudder has a large dent from where it looks like they missed the back-rivet plate, and no proseal was used in the TE. I could go on with the defect list for pages. So, I decide that this emp was not useable. I strip off the few reuseable parts and will scrap the rest of the assemply.
A week ago I ordered a new emp kits from Vans. They shipped fast and I received my kit the same week (today). So now I will build an new emp.
Here are just a few picture of the purchased Emp number two. This is how not to build one:
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Hack job, this is the rivet quality throughout
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The skin was dimpled, all the ribs were countersunk - badly
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More quality workmanship
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