On Friday I did a flight for FlyOtto to Montrose Colorodo. The couple wanted to go to Telluride, which is a convenient airport nestled into the mountains minutes away from the ski resort, but it was closed due to bad weather. Montrose is the closest airport, an hour drive north of Telluride. I’ll pick them up Sunday.

I cut some hinges for the horizontal tail and marked the pilot holes. On the vertical tail I pre-drilled all the pilot holes and fortunately they lined up well with the pilot holes pre-fabricated in the skin. But it was a scary moment when I first lines them up. So for these hinges, I’ll hold off on drilling the pilot holes until I marry them with their mounting surface.

Attached 8 bolts to the rear spar. Here the plans called for 16 washers, 2 for each bolt, whereas the prior bolted parts only called for one washer per bolt. Not a big deal except the hardware kit only came with 20 AN906-10 washers and 6 of them had already been used elsewhere. I emailed Sonex about this discrepancy. So I only used one washer per bolt. I hope that’s okay.

Kerry from Sonex asked me to remove the part of my last post where I said the vertical tail tip just doesn’t fit. He thinks it will mislead people. He sent me a picture of their OneX’s tail tip. Although it looks better than mine, I can still see the rudder sticking out further than the tip. So I don’t believe I’m wrong. I spent some time with my friend Rob analysing the tip problem some more and he seems to agree that there’s no way to make the tip fit perfectly. I’ve resolved to leave the tip as is, not trash it and redo it, because I don’t believe that will result in a perfect fit. Perhaps later I’ll apply some of the composite workshop techniques I learned to fix the problem.

Horizontal Tail Ribs Hinges Sonex Tail