Empennage fairing progress

I continued to make slow progress on the various fairings - I got the rudder top fairing ready to rivet:

Rudder top fairing match-drilled and clecoed in place

Backing strip attached to rudder top fairing

For smoothing the face of the elevator fairing and filling the pinhole, a nice layer of resin with cab-o-sil was used, followed by patiently sanding down to 2000 grit:

Elevator fairing with tons of pinholes to fill!

Elevator fairing after filling pinholes

We glued foam to the horizontal stabilizer fairings, and proceeded to mold it to be slightly concave to preserve the gap from the elevator fairings. The vertical stabilizer fairing didn't need that and was just flat:

HS fairing with foam plug glued in place

Sanding foam to fit the HS fairing

Concave-sanded foam plug for the horizontal stabilizer fairing

VS foam plus, which was mostly flat

Adding a layer of fiber to it was easy, but removing the foam afterwards took a bit of work, first cutting chunks off, then sanding, then cleaning up the remaining bits with acetone:

Layer of fiber applied to the HS fairings, following the shape of the foam

Removing bits of foam from the HS fairings

Remaining little bits of foam on the layer of fiber

Layer of fiber after cleaning with acetone

I last-minute decided that I wanted to use screws to attach the vertical stabilizer fairing (since I'm running conduit up there, may as well make it easy to install something - be it a camera or a NAV antenna if the Bob Archer one doesn't work well), so I added those, but of course overlooked the fact that I didn't have any K2000-06 nutplates for the last hole, so that'll get finished and glued on later:

Vertical stabilizer fairing backing strip with nutplates for attaching with screws

I then added the two layers of fiber to the inside of each of those fairings. Working in that tight space was not the easiest and getting the fiber to not fold on itself required some contortion, but it worked out well:

Tip fairings atop fiber layers to be added to their inside

Tip fairings after adding the inside layers

Next will be finishing the outside face of those layers, attaching them to the stabilizers, then smoothing the joint so there's no gap. After the above steps I'm also able to detach the HS and elevators, and finish drilling/tapping the holes underneath it.

Time lapse:

Total empennage fairing rivets: 116

Total empennage fairing time: 65.2h