With all of the doors fabric covered and heat shrunk, they all received the
standard treatment of Poly Brush:
Reinforcement tapes were then fitted and attached as per the Poly-Fiber instructions, to all tubes and edges as well as around the door latch locations.
Here is the completed Cargo Door with plexiglass window installed:
The wire hanging down is one of the wires for the rear passenger headset
plugs ,which will be installed later.
Here is the forward door and window completed:
I will install a piece of stainless steel plate where the window latch rubs
on the door.
Next I'll be covering the horizontal stabilizers and elevators (including trim tabs).
The horizontal stabilizers and trim tabs are fairly straight-forward so I won't take the space to show how they were covered. As a brief description however, the horizontal stabilizers (and trim tabs) were each covered with one piece of fabric, glued along the leading (curved) edge, wrapped around the spar, then back to the leading edge again and glued with a 1" overlap. Put the glue seam on the bottom of the horizontal stabilizers (and trim tabs).
The elevators have the counter-weight arm sticking out front, so they are a bit more of a challenge, and I'll show here how I covered them. I ended up doing them as two pieces, a top and a bottom.
It's best to cover the bottom of the elevator first, gluing the edges to the tube all the way around. With the bottom done, turn it over and cover the top, over-lapping the bottom fabric 1" and gluing it. This puts the glue seam on the bottom of the elevator, where it can't be as easily seen.
Here is one of the elevators at the starting point:
The fabric was cut a few inches oversize and glued along the edges pulling
it tight as I went. Clamps are used to help hold it steady as you go, so
it won't move around on you.
With the edges all glued, the fabric was trimmed and glued, wrapped around
the tubes:
In the picture above, I still need to glue the spar area .
Once the bottom fabric was all glued in place, the elevator was turned over and lightly ironed with a 225 degree iron, just to stiffen it up a bit and give me a good solid surface for the top fabric seam to be glued to.
Here is the top fabric being fitted and glued along the edges:
Again, clamps help hold it in place as you go.
This time the fabric was carefully trimmed to allow a 1" overlap and it was glued down, smoothing out all wrinkles as best as possible. It helps to pre-shrink the fabric around the curves with a 225 iron before gluing.
Here the fabric has been trimmed and the gluing has been started at the spar
and counterweight arm:
