Fiberglassing tips "weight issue"

[Mycool]

I am in the process of "glassing in" tips. My question is about weight. Does anyone know what weight of empennage is individually? Is the extra weight an issue, or is it more about balancing elevators? I guess I can compensate with drilling out material in the counterweight.

I must say though that the finished look of the tips looks great!

Pics to follow!!!

 

[chris mitchell]

Balance the elevators!

No idea what eh weight of the epoxy/glass/filler will be.

However, you need to balance the elevators - but remember you are going to add paint, so you would need to balance them once that final step is complete.

You may find that you need to drill some counterweight material out, but I'm guessing that you will more likely need to add some weight to counteract the weight of the paint.

From memory I drilled a small hole near the front of the glass tip and added some epoxy/lead shot to get everything balanced, then filled and touched up.

Should probably do the same thing to the rudder I guess.

Hope that helps,

Chris

 

[bret]

I did glass and paint, I did not remove any lead until finished.

 

[Guy Prevost]

I did glass and paint, I did not remove any lead until finished.

Ditto. I also added a 10-32 nutplate at the forward tooling holes in the counter balance arms so that I could add a stack of washers to get each elevator balanced just right after paint. That worked well.