Trim tab

I took a little time for shop clean up tonight, now that the engine is not hanging on the hoist anymore. After that I worked on reinstalling my new trim tab. As you can see on this post, I had to make a new one since the old tab was cracked due to a bad modification which led into fatigue.

Before installing the new tab on the airplane, I applied transparent polyeurethane erosion tape on the bottom since it is highly exposed to prop blast. Here is how the bottom of my old tab looked like when I removed it:

One other thing I realized when I removed the old tab was that the attachment holes on the piano hinge were badly ovalized:

Again, this demonstrated to me how little details can be very important. The old screws were standard AN526 SS screws with almost zero shank length. The S-1S parts catalog calls for screws with a small shank so that no shear load is applied on the thread. I'm pretty sure that if the correct fastener was used, my old aluminium piano hinge wouldn't be as bad. I decided to replace the crews with AN 525 washer screws. You can see the subtle difference between the two here:

Here is a shot of the final installation compared with the old tab.

Again, big thanks to my friend Paul who patiently helped me building the new tab. Thanks also to my friend Joe who helped me with the paint (I hate painting).