Category: Empennage
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08: Rear Fuselage
This is easily the biggest part of the kit so far, and felt the most accomplished as I finished it. There weren’t as many small pieces to deal with, everything was larger and even though the number of hours I spent for this section was on par with other chapters, it felt like I accomplished…
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07: Elevator(s)
For some reason I was dreading this but it really wasn’t that bad. There was tedium, sure, but it wasn’t bad. There were some new techniques learned in this section as well, which I’ll get in to below. First I had to separate and prep a bunch of stiffners, including some foam ones. This project…
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06: Horizontal Stabilizer
The first thing I worked on here was some match drilling of doublers to the spars for the Horizontal Stab. Let the primer-prep begin! Time to prime! With priming complete, time to start assembly Ok, NOW the horizontal stab is done!
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05: Rudder Assembly
With priming complete, and the Vertical Stab finished, it became time to knock out the Rudder. The trailing edge of the rudder has a special wedge that gets secured in and works to promote a nice straight trailing edge. This piece was countersunk in a previous blog. It is now time to start finalizing the…
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04: Assembling the Vertical Stabilizer
My first sets of post-primer rivets getting set as I start to assemble the Vertical Stab Yeah, dimpling post-primer is the way When I started, I told my buddy Scott, “I’m going to try to never have to drill out a bad rivet” and I honestly didn’t understand why he was laughing so hard. Then…
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03: First Priming Session
I had a lot of anxiety going in to this.. I hadn’t shot primer in a long time and for some reason I really felt like I was going to mess this up and be forever ruined. Turns out, everything was fine. I did a final wipe with Acetone all the parts I was going…
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02: Starting the Rudder
With the vertical stab ready for primer, I don’t want to do a whole bunch of different priming sessions, I want to try to group some together, so I’ve put the Vertical Stab bits aside and started working on the Rudder. I started by gathering all the parts, cutting and shaping any necessary parts and…
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01: And it begins..
The tail kit arrived, which contains the Vertical Stabilizer, Rudder, Horizontal Stabilizer, Elevators, and Aft Fuselage. While this kit arrived in early October 2024, I wasn’t ready to start yet. The tool kit from Cleaveland arrived obviously, but skillset-wise I just wasn’t ready yet. Fast forward to December, I finally started taking things out of…