Stabilator Mounting (8)

8 hours

I was thinking of packing everything up after the canopy was done, but I still have a few weeks before I need to move the plane so I thought I'd see if I could get the stabilators mounted first.  That way I wouldn't have to worry about packing them up separately.

Anyway, I began by trying to test fit one of the stabilators in place between the back of the turtledeck and the tail post.  I quickly realized that the notches I cut out way back when I first started on the turtledeck were not in the right place.

The two notches near the center were supposed to be at the outer edges to accept the end of the stabilator spar.  Not too big of a deal, I just cut new notches, and I made them a little deeper than what the plans specified for clearance.  With that done, I was able to get both stabilators in place.

Then I pilot drilled the aft spars to the tail post.

I also had to trim the lower stabilator skins slightly to clear the sides of the fuselage.  The part I trimmed looked like this (the purple sharpie line):

Next I worked on fitting the attach angles to the forward spars.  I got everything positioned and then pilot drilled both angles.

I updrilled all the holes to 1/8", but I couldn't get a straight enough shot at them to updrill all the way to 3/16", so I did the final updrilling off the plane to make sure the holes were straight.

I didn't have any clecos long enough to hold the mounting blocks to the angles during updrilling, so I took the lower attach angle and clamped the blocks to it, then drilled the holes straight to the final size on the drill press.

I did one more test fit, and also updrilled all the holes on the back side.

Then I took everything apart again for the last time to deburr all the parts.  This is why the plans told me not to rivet one side of the stabilator way back when I built it; I was able to lift the skin up on the top side and deburr the inner surface of the aft spar.

In order to install the bolts, I was just barely able to place them in the holes in each forward spar and then squeeze the heads past the turtledeck skin.  The challenging part was getting a wrench between the last turtledeck former and the spars to hold each bolt!

After much contorting of fingers, I finally got all 14 fasteners tightened.

All that was left then was to rivet the aft spars to the tail post, and install all the rivets in the upper stabilator skins, and the tail was installed!

Canopy Final Installation (6)

6 hours

I finally got around to finishing up the canopy.  It took a lot of finagling to get all the holes in the canopy to line up with the tapped holes in the frame well enough for all the fasteners to go in nicely.  I ended up enlarging most of the holes to 11/64" to avoid putting stress on the plexiglass from the screws.  Some of the holes had to go as large as 3/16"!  Anyway I got the whole canopy screwed on, including the one hole that caused me so much trouble previously.  I just used a longer screw and a nut.

The last thing to do was adjust the notches in the canopy latch so it could be locked and unlocked smoothly.  Initially they were way too tight to close at all, so I had to do quite a lot of filing until the latch actually fit over the pins in the fuselage.

This was also the first time I ever actually sat in the plane!

My assistant was less excited.

After many, many iterations of gradually filing open the latch slots, it eventually began to operate nicely.  Then I sanded down the locking tab a bit until it also fit.  This is just a simple piece that can be padlocked to the tab on the outside of the latch, preventing it from being opened.

With that, the canopy is finally done!