Empennage Fairing Fiberglass Work (9/14/14)

1.5 Hours –

I know it has been four months since my last post, but I have been working on the plane occasionally.  I’ve been doing little things here and there, but never enough to make it worth posting.  Today, however, I decided to dive back in, head first, by doing some fiberglass work on the empennage fairing.

I’ve been working on trying to get the front left of the empennage fairing to lay flat with the horizontal stabilizer.  For a large portion of the offending area, I was able to use a heat gun to gently warm and then re-shape the fairing.  However, the leading edge of the fairing still sat about 1/4 inch above the stabilizer, and I knew there was no way it was going to stretch or bend any further.  The only solutions were to fill the area or to cut it away and re-glass it.  I opted to re-glass since filling might leave one side looking thicker than the other.

After cutting away the bad area of the empennage fairing, I started gathering all my fiberglass tools and materials.  It has been a long time since I’ve done any fiberglass work, and I’ve never tried to glass a compound curve.  I decided to use 6 layers of fiberglass (I can’t remember what type/weight I have, but I bought it because it would be suitable for just about everything on the RV), and I probably should have just laid out the material, added the resin, and then cut the strips I needed, but I decided to cut the strips first.  No big deal, but it was probably a little harder to work with the epoxy soaked strips this way.  However, it wasn’t long before I had the epoxy soaked glass laid out on the empennage fairing and covered with some peel-ply.

My West System epoxy is a few years old…hopefully it still works!

After cutting away the bad area of the empennage fairing, I put down six layers of glass. Wrapping it around the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer was easier than I thought it would be.

Finally, a few strips of peel-ply went down to absorb some of the excess resin.

Later in the evening, I checked to see if the epoxy hardened.  Since it did, I went ahead and removed the peel-ply and inspected my work.  It isn’t the prettiest set up, but a little trimming and filling should make it work.  Hopefully removing the fairing from the fuselage won’t be too difficult a task!

Later in the evening, I peeled the peel-ply, and this is what I had. Hopefully, it won’t be too hard to remove the fairing. Then, I’ll have a lot of trimming and filling to do.