Empennage Revisit

About a year ago I called my Empennage finished.  I mentioned that it's more of a 'done for now' type thing than being finished.  I decided to wait to do this aft piece to make it easier to mess within the tailcone while I tried to figure out what all happens back there. There were several things I wanted to work through at a later day before I went ahead and riveted on the aft tailcone skin.  Could of done this a year ago but really didn't know, wanted to limit my time climbing into the tailcone.

I'm actively working through the doors which involve some fiberglass work leaving gaps of time to work on other things.  One of these things was to finish up the riveting of the aft top tailcone skin.  Since I have a good idea of what's going to go back there I decided to at least get cable tie bases secured. I also used some caterpillar edging around the lightening holes where I will end up with cabling pushed through. Below is a picture showing the cable tie bases secured to the side.  I ended up mirroring both sides to give me options later on when running cabling.  These are just 3/4" bases where I used acetone to remove the factory adhesive and I used some super strong 3M 2 part epoxy type stuff to glue it to the sides.  Surface prep is always important so when you figure out where you want to put these you can just sand a bit off.  To test I pulled on these fairly hard to a point that if I kept pulling would end up just puckering the skin.

Secured cable tie bases 

With that out of the way I riveted up the aft skin.  A majority of it I did solo but found it much easier and had better results with a second set of hands.  My neighbor came down and helped buck these rivets (He ended up having to crawl into the tailcone).  This was one of the few times that I've riveted with two people and to be honest you get a much more consistent result when you can focus on holding the rivet gun in place.  Looking back it would of been nice to do the entire plane with two people. After that we cleaned it up a bit and cleco'd back on the center section.  I will wait till much later to rivet this piece on.  Probably during final assembly.

Aft skin riveted in place.

Finishing Kit Delivery

It took about two and a half months but this morning my finishing kit was finally delivered.  To be fair the original date was early January but I traveled for work two last month for extended period so had them put a delay on shipping until I knew I was going to be here for a week.  Surprisingly the box was a lot smaller than I anticipated.  There was a small puncture in the box so cracked it open while the driver was still here to make sure nothing was damaged.  All is good.

Finishing Kit

With my neighbors assistance we were able to inventory the kits fairly expeditiously. After a few hours everything was accounted for and in place for future attachment to the plane.  The pictures are a bit misleading as everything still takes up quite a bit of space, but there are a lot of larger pieces.