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Dent in empennage

RV6-KPTW

Well Known Member
Hi,

I have discovered a dent / deflection on my empennage. This is a flying airplane (70+ hours) that just went into the paint shop. I am trying to gauge the severity and what, if anything, I should do about it. The painter says no big deal, he can make it go away. But is it a structural issue I should address?

It is a little difficult to see in the real and less so in photo. I attach several photos.
- Location: I outlined the area with marker and brackets. The dots are marker as well.
- Deflection: This photo is probably the best view of the skin distortion – towards the bottom left of the photo. There is no matching distortion on the right side, leading me to believe hangar rash as the cause rather than a flying issue (and I have no recollection of this occurring....).
- Detail: I tried to show how big a deflection. While the Deflection photo shows a clear change in the surface, a straight edge across the deflection does not show the difference in the photo. With the eye, there is a faint glimmer from behind the rule but not shown on the photo. I am guessing a couple of thousands is the depth of the valley.

I appreciate any thoughts.

Thanks
 

Attachments

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    Location.png
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  • deflection.png
    deflection.png
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Agree that's not a structural issue. But if you want to avoid filler, you could have a paintless dent removal guy come out and massage it.
 
During the extrusion/milling process the sheet is squeezed between a series of rollers - this "dent" is an artifact of a flat spot in one or more of the rollers.

It happens more frequently than you might suspect. FWIW I had a similar defect show up in the top fuselage skin of my RV-7 (Kit circa 2015).

You can dress it out with scotchbright green pad and paint it...

B
 
Thanks all! On a parallel track, I had emailed/talked to Vans support and they also concluded it was a cosmetic issue.
 
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