Damazio family's RV-10 project: Empennage fairing riveting and filling/sanding

I continued the work on the empennage fairing by drilling the nutplate holes for its screws:

Vertical and horizontal stabilizer nutplate holes

Unfortunately, most of those holes actually were on or very close to the flange flutes. I was afraid that a solid rivet would expand in that space, and didn't want to flatten the flute, so instead of dimpling and riveting with solid rivets, I machine-countersunk and used CCR264 nutplate blind rivets, which worked out well:

Vertical stabilizer nutplate holes overlapping the flutes

Vertical stabilizer nutplates attached with CCR264s

Vertical stabilizer fairing nutplate holes attached

On the horizontal stabilizer, I did dimple and use solid rivets (except for two holes which were too close to the edges of the rib flanges, so I countersunk those):

Horizontal stabilizer fairing nutplates attached

We continued the sand-fill-repeat process on the bottom rudder fairing, and got a lot closer to a good finish:

Bottom rudder fairing with primer applied to spot pinholes

At this point, we, of course, sanded it again as several pinholes became evident - and squeegeed another layer of resin with some flox in:

Bottom rudder fairing trailing edge after another layer of resin

We laid up some epoxy and flox around the elevator fairings to make a smooth transition:

Forward face of the elevator fairing filled with resin/flox (unsanded)

Gap between fairing and elevator filled with resin/flox (unsanded)

After that comes a lot of sanding to make a smooth transition on all of them. So far we only did the forward faces, and even those still need a lot of pinhole filling: