After playing throttles, I moved to the back end of the aircraft. Vans issues a Service Letter, SL-00014. This was to install stiffeners in the tail cone for the RV-7/8/9. I saw a comment from Vans on VAF that the stiffeners were fabricated from 0.025" alclad. Rather than ordering these from the US, I fabricated my own in my sheet metal folder. The plans were straight forward and the task didn't take too long.
