Now that the metal work is done, it is time to fit and blend the fiberglass tips onto the sheet metal. Vans recommends using blind rivets to attach the tips and call it good. Leaving the seams and rivets visible. You have to remember, Vans is very utilitarian in their aircraft design philosophy. Cheap, light and very basic is their building motto. Now, for me, that's quite boring. Half the fun of doing one of these planes is putting your personal touches on it, doing something to seperate it from the 'garden variety' RV7. Building it in a way that shows some craftmanship. So, with all that being said, I am doing this task a little different. I will fair the seams and fiberglass and rivet the tips in place. When I'm done, you will not see any seams, the tips will blend perfectly into the sheet metal so you wont know where one begins and the other ends. Not an original idea, plenty (most) builders do it this way. It looks very nice when done right. This is a time consuming task to do it this way, it also will add a little weight and expense.
So here is the HS with the elevators attached for fitting.
Here is the first fitting, I have just set the tips (white parts) in place so that I can get an idea where I need to trim the fiberglass for a good fit.
Here you can see the marks for trimming. I will use the dremel tool to trim away some of the fiberglass so that it fits nicely over the counterweight.
After trmming this is what it looks like.
And in this photo, if you look close you can see where it was trimmed. Underneath the tip is the lead counterweight.
Another shot of the tips in place, slowly trimming them down to a size I am happy with. If you look close, you can see the blue foam that I used to close off the HS tip. I fiberglassed the foam in place to close off this gap.
You can start to see how the tips really make it look aerodynamic and clean. The tips give it a nice finished look. When I am finshed I will spray the tips with a filler/primer and they will look very nice if all goes well.
No comments:
Post a Comment