I continued the work on the empennage fairing by drilling the nutplate holes for its screws:
Vertical and horizontal stabilizer nutplate holes
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
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:
Forward face of left elevator fairing, before filling pinholes
Forward face of right elevator fairing, before filling pinholes
We attached the empennage parts together (at least temporarily), starting with the stabilizers:
Horizontal and veritical stabilizers mounted in place
Fuselage, tailcone and stabilizers all together!
Full-airplane view with the stabilizers on
We attached the elevators, measured and adjusted their travel:
Elevators attached to the horizontal stabilizer
Lower travel limit at ~24˚
Upper travel limit at ~28˚
To get it to the target range (25° down, 30° up), I had to file down the elevator stops a bit:
Slots filed down to increase upper elevator range
Slot filed down to increase lower elevator range
Bottom view of elevator range slot
Final lower elevator travel at ~25˚
Final upper elevator travel at ~30˚
This, unfortunately, created the need to comply with SB18-03-30. It was only then that I realized - and Van's support confirmed, that I didn't need to do any of this :/ instead, the section on flight testing specifies a range of angles, and my original values were within that range, so I'll likely just replace that angle with one that's untrimmed.
With all the parts attached and adjusted, it looked pretty impressive, and gave a real sense of progress:
All empennage parts attached to the fuselage
I'll take advantage of having all these parts on to work on the empennage fairings, before I pull them out again, address the SB, and store them away until final assembly time.
In my first tech counselor visit, quite a while ago, they identified that the rear spar caps in the vertical stabilizer were not properly deburred (not surprising, it was the first part I ever made):
Vertical stabilizer's poor deburring from 2014
After much hesitation, I decided to redo that rear spar and its attached parts, so I had a lot of rivets to remove:
Vertical stabilizer skin rivets to remove
For the 1/8" rivets that attached it to the ribs, I had to remove them through the shop head, but that turned out to work well with exactly the same technique - drill to some depth, break the head off, and then the actual rivet hole is evident to finish drilling:
Vertical stabilizer attachment to middle inspar rib being removed
After just a few minutes (easier than I expected), I had the whole thing off:
Old rear spar removed from the vertical stabilizer
I got the new parts from Van's, and got to work like it was 2014 again:
New rear spar being drilled
Since I already have the completed tailcone, I skipped ahead and final-drilled the VS rear spar into the tailcone now, so I could countersink the bottom holes and prime the whole thing:
Rear spar attached to the tailcone
Rear spar match-drilled and bolted onto the tailcone
Like before, I added a nutplate for the grounding strap, slightly closer to the brackets this time:
Grounding strap nutplate
After primer, I riveted everything back together:
Rear spar riveted together
Vertical stabilizer completely riveted again
The holes that attach to the middle inspar rib got cherry rivets (CR3213-4-2) instead:
Cherry rivets attaching the middle inspar rib to the rear spar
Overall, the results were a lot better than before (who knew, 5 years of building experience makes a difference :) ):
New (left) and old (right) rear spars
Time lapse:
Total vertical stabilizer rivets: 350 (I didn't count repeat rivets again, so no diff from last time) Total vertical stabilizer time: 76.1h
I had a brief hiatus while (1) waiting for more rivets to arrive; (2) spending some more time with my wife; (3) taking some vacation time traveling to Oshkosh Airventure:
I'll later post a summary of RV-relevant things I saw and found out at Airventure.
Now that I'm back and I have rivets, finishing the vertical stabilizer was pretty quick, and consisted of riveting the rear spar and the top and bottom ribs:
Minus some rough edges (hey, it was the first airplane part I ever built), I'm quite happy with the results, and eager to complete the next parts (rudder is not far from completion).
Time lapse:
Total vertical stabilizer time: 63.6h Total vertical stabilizer rivets: 350
Were it not for this, I might have finished the VS today, since the remaining rivets are all squeezed and thus easier to set. I have more rivets on order (of multiple sizes, just to be sure), and meanwhile the progress on the rudder is also stalled (since the counterweight rib was the next thing to rivet, which also takes -3.5s) - I guess it's time for another round of priming to start riveting the horizontal stabilizer together.
Meanwhile, the inside rivets actually came out quite good (only 3 needed replacement, which has been amazingly easy to do since I got this tool), except for a few scratches on the primer from hitting it with the bucking bar:
Time lapse:
Total vertical stabilizer time: 58h Total vertical stabilizer rivets: 234
Now that I know a bit more about antennas (lots of thanks to Don from Delta Pop Aviation for the patience explaining a lot of it), I've decided that I don't want to add a whisker-type antenna to the vertical stabilizer (more on that later), which means the VS is ready to be finished!
Before taking any other steps, I studied the best place to attach the bonding strap (which bonds the VS to the rudder), and decided to install a nut plate for it close to one of the hinge brackets (about the same height as in the rudder):
I then clecoed the skin on and double-checked that everything looked right:
I started riveting in the order suggested by vans - with the middle nose rib, followed by the top rib forward of the front spar:
The conduit proved to be annoying, as it got in the way of holding a bucking bar against some of the holes (tungsten bucking bar to the rescue!):
I got so far as to do the bottom nose rib and rivet the front spar as far as the squeezer would go (but it was late so I didn't want to annoy the neighbors by bucking any more rivets) - more to come later!
Time lapse:
Total vertical stabilizer time: 54.2h Total vertical stabilizer rivets: 141
Now that I know a bit more about antennas (lots of thanks to Don from 
