Wow it feels great to be finished with the tail. It has been a challenge to get the time to get this completed. My wife and kids helped out a great deal. I am was surprised today for fathers day as they cleaned up the build space, built me out a peg board for my tools and framed the drawings of the plane. It was a great surprise. They then spent the whole afternoon helping to finish the tail cone. My son did an awesome job riveting most of the tail cone together. I worked on the squeezed rivet pieces and alternated playing cleco man with my wife and working on some pop riveting.
We had a minor issue with some missing bolts we needed to get re-ordered from Van's. We also had some challenges getting washers into place between the stabilator and the rear bulkhead. The other minor challenge is the static source. It appears the one static source rivet just didn't expand enough on the back side to hold the tubing. Luckily I had ordered a spare just in case we messed it up. We will drill out that one tomorrow to put in the new one and hopefully have better luck with the setting of that one.
All in all, I am very impressed with the kit so far. I am having an open hangar next Saturday and inviting friends, many of them pilots, over to help pull some rivets on the wing kit. It should be a fun day, some good food and some help pulling rivets.
We passed a milestone of sorts today too. We finished off the first box of 2500 pop rivets. It seems incredible that we have used that many rivets already. I am guessing the wing kit is going to take quite a few more to finish up.
Here are some pics of our tail cone construction.
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