ORIGINAL: YellowAircraft

Hi,

So, on my off-time, I started doing some prep work on this. I've snapped the plywood parts out of their sheets and assembled the stab bearing boxes. Nothing fancy there. I've seen a few guys build this bird and redo this section or add a bunch of reinforcement to it, but it's totally unnecessary if assembled per instructions. Contrary to the instructions, though, the bearing boxes will be glued to the bulkheads outside of the airplane and shoved back there and glued in place when cured.

I pulled out the other bulkheads to ponder mods. For the twin-turbine ones I've built, I added a 1/8'' carbon plate doubler to the front and back of the front main bulkhead, but those bulkheads had far less meat to them as they were cut to accommodate twin inlets. This one is plenty good-to-go for single turbine use, especially since it already has an additional 1/8'' ply doubler factor installed.

The rear main bulkhead comes with a supplied 1/8'' aluminum doubler which is epoxied and bolted onto the 1/4'' ply bulkhead.

The stab shafts are 8mm titanium with a steel cross-pin. The cross-pin slides into a slot cut into the (very wide) hard balsa block which is glued into the balsa-sheeted foam-core stab. There's an 8-oz carbon cloth sandwiched between the balsa and the foam in the stab too. When the stab root is capped with ply, the root side of the cross-pin is encapsulated between the balsa block and the ply root with epoxy, too. The result is a stab which 'ain't goin' nowhere', and will never develop slop or play in the shaft.

I'm going to use the scale aileron and flap hinges, which are a lot bigger than I thought they were. The go through the bottom skin, the balsa I'll insert in the wings and all the way to the top skin. Each flap and aileron only has two hinges per (scale).

Note the strategic use of honeycomb in my tail bulkheads, inspired by recent scientific discoveries regarding proper tail-section design.