The empennage kit finally arrived (rudder, vertical stabiliser, horizontal stabiliser and elevator). Although some major parts missing, like the main spar! Anyway started by unpacking and removing plastic coverings. A good tip is to use a heat gun on the larger skin areas. It’s quite hard to remove the plastics in a cold workshop in December. Sort parts to main subunits – rudder, vertical stabiliser, horizontal stabiliser and elevator. Then to deburring mostly with a large drill bit or a small cordless drill with a countersink bit, a steel rule and a deburring tool for the larger holes. Purple Scotchbrite to finish off deburring. 2 days prep and deburring all parts of the empennage. Then my first dimpling. Having never done dimpling before, I read up around the topic. Philip Rueker’s blog has some good info. Important to note that Sling uses 120-degree dimple dies (not more standard 100 degrees). Two sizes of dimple dies are included in the kit. (Although since the materials are quite thin, the same size die is used for both skin and rib). The introduction KAI instructs that the holes to be dimpled are smaller (2.8 mm) and match drilled to 3.1 mm before a countersunk rivet is used. (I placed the Sling dies in my hand dimple tool). Andy kindly lent me his DRDT2. As my project is a quick build, I think I only have the empennage skins and possibly the aileron skins to dimple with the DRDT2. The rest of the ribs can be done with a hand dimple tool. The next step is to purple Scotchbright all internal surfaces, degrease and spray with Aerowave.
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