Empennage

All the tail components come from the factory welded and ready to assemble. You have to fabricate some pushrods, spacers, and cables. A rough cut out trim handle is supplied but it’s up to you how you want to connect the cables. The trim tabs come welded to the elevators so these must be cut out, prepped and set up.

Figuring out how much lead is needed for mass balancing the elevators is a bit of a guess. I talked with another builder and found out that 6Ibs is good to start with, but I will go with 5.5 next time (1/2Ib less to remove, once cast, is allot) but 5.5 is still more than you need. I had some light weight polyfiber with Aerothane on it from a repair, so I cut out 1 sq/ft and weighed it which came out to 0.8 oz. I added 0.2 as medium weight fabric will be going on the elevator, so this gave me 1 oz/sqft of fabric. I went liberal on the sq/ft calculation for both sides of elevator and used 15 sqft, so this works out to 15 oz. of painted fabric. I then placed a slightly heavier (1.2Ib) piece of steel just slightly aft of the midspan of the elevator to replicate the fabric weight. This way, when finished, I will probably be heavier on the lead than lighter, which is what I want as it is much easier to remove weight to do final balance than add it.