Horizontal Stabilizer mounting

07 Jun 2004 Horizontal Stabilizer mounting

This article is continued from here: http://www.rv8.ch/article.php?story=2004031620072395

A trick I learned on the net is that once the last bulkhead is installed on the top skin near the tail, then you have to crawl into the fuselage to mount the HS. This is pretty tricky, and can only be done when two people are around. I didn’t want to be faced with this problem, so I took the advice of another builder and installed some nutplates there, instead of using washers and nuts.

Here is a picture of the right side:

Here is the left side (note that I had the camera “upside down”):

And here is a picture of the top. I did scratch up the Van’s QB wash primer, but I’ll probably re-prime this area anyway.

It was quite a bit of work to do this, requiring a couple of trips into the tail part of the fuselage, but I could complete it without a helper, and now putting on and taking off the HS is much easier.

Of course, I did check with Van’s to make sure that there is no strength issue with using 10-32 nutplates instead of the washer and nut – they confirmed that in this application there is no problem.