ZNLine Factory Enigma Build by Mark Novack

Now I shall remove the stabs for facing. Nothing hard about this at all. I weigh my Le pieces and tip pieces. First I put on my oversized LEs, then after about an hour I cut them down, sanded them even and glued on the tips. Again, Titebond is used. Here are two pair sitting in their holders.

When it's all dry, I remove the tape. Tonight, I'm just going to knock the LE and tips down even with the sheeting. I'll have a sanding party later to round LEs and shape tips of both the stabs and wings. That is a solid days work to shape ten stab LEs and twenty tip. The tips are all shaped before cutting away the control surfaces. We feel that doing shaping the tip as a hole piece results in a more even blending between wing/aileron and stab/elevator tips. Again, here is the stab evened out.

Not difficult, just tedious work. It's small work, but done well adds greatly to the overall professional appearance of the airplane. I'm going to spend a few posts on this showing two methods. I prefer the method of gluing the washer to the tube before even mounting the wing, but as we needed to get wings mounted and did not have our light ply carbon laminate for the washers, we had to mount some washers after the tube was in. Either way gives great results. The first method is easier. As I have already gone through the tube preparation earlier, I'll just show the washer stage of the process. In this first picture, we glue the washer (carbon face up) to the tube using a 6mm bolt as our guide jig. CA works great here.

We drop the bolt with the washer into the hole in the wing and mark the outline of the washer on the wing. Easy stuff, yeah?

A Dremel tool with a flat cutting stone easily cuts a shallow, flat bevel into the wing. It should be perpendicular to the hole. Be careful to get it as close as possible, but don't go crazy, A nice light mixture of epoxy and micro balloon will fill any remaining gaps and put a beautiful fillet around the washer. Here is the cut bevel.

It sit nicely in the bevel! We do not cut the bevel too deeply. We do not need this flush with the wing. We leave some balsa under the washer. We will glue it in and then mount this wing tomorrow.

The other method has the tube already installed in the wing. We will use a router to shave the tubes down and cut a small bevel into the wing. We jig the router the same way as when we cut the tube holes. Here is a picture of the bevel cut with the tube already in the wing. This wing has been mounted.

Notice on the TE holes that we do not cut into the wing. We simply flatten out the tube a bit. It is not necessary to bevel into the wing as the epoxy/micro balloon mixture will fill the slight gap nicely. 

Carbon and light ply. Strong, light, pretty.

We put the thick mixture around the bolt hole, and using a 6mm bolt as the guide, drop it on in. We use a metal bolt here that will easily break free of any stray epoxy that that got into the threads. Let the epoxy form a nice fillet. I will go back tomorrow with epoxy and fillet any washers that do not have a nice fillet already. The 24 hour epoxy really soaks in, so sometimes the beautiful fillet such as is this photo disappears overnight.

Here sits our five wings all ready to have the tips shaped, ailerons cut free, faced, hinged, beveled, and horn plate mounted. Then final sanding and boom, off the the coverer. Not to much longer and we will be working on the forward fuselage internals!!!

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