Rear fuselage skin & fixing a damaged inner skin
TLDR
- Got the replacement side step gusset and installed it
- Installed rudder cable
- Built the luggage extension box
- Installed tail harness
- Installed rear fuselage skin
- Found a damage on inner skin and fixed them
Details
Replacement Gusset
Last week I discovered that my kit came with 2 right step support gusset by mistake. Sling was super quick to find a replacement for me, and I received it just with a few days.
So I cleaned, deburred and installed the replacement. Everything is good. I am unblocked to install skin.
Rudder cable
Before adding skin, I wanted to put in the rudder cable and tail harness first before access becomes a problem.
Installing the rudder cable isn’t difficult. The KAI has step by step instruction to ensure the brackets are installed correctly and the cables cross each other correctly.
None of the nuts and screws are tightened. I will leave those to final rigging.
Tail harness
The tail harness installation is fairly straightforward. I added a cable sleeve on the harness just for extra protection, then I used the harness made by Midwest Panel Builder. It’s preassembled and came with a pretty good install instruction. I ran the harness on the side along the channels, and installed a few M4 rivnuts to hold the harness with adel-clamps.
Towards the empennage, the wire goes out through a 2 grommets, and I installed GT150 connectors for the tail strobe light and the trim motor.
Damaged parts
Just by random coincedence, I noticed a weird bend on CF-SKN-006-L and CF-SKN-006-R. The bends are roughly at the same place so I thought that’s maybe by design? So I asked Sling technical, and unfortunately that’s damaged during shipping.
The suggestion I received was that I can try to unbend them using a flange forming tool, which I did. But the flange just isn’t really flat any more. So I checked again with Sling, and with their approval, I will make a doubler under the flange to add strength.
Luggage extension box
I procrastinated a little before installing the skin, so I decided to build something easy. I picked a luggage extension box to build.
It’s fairly straightforward, just a few large skin clecoed and riveted together. And I followed what most others has done, and added some sound proofing foam around the box.
Skin
Finally, with most of the small parts done, I started to install skin.
This is only like 2 pages on the KAI, but took me a long time to finish. It’s a lot of hole matching, and riveting.
Evan’s Sling build video is a great source to help me get oriented. I started from rear, and the moved toward the front. The rear bulkhead was the most difficult part to line up. Once that’s done, the rest was a lot easier, just time consuming. As I moved towards the front, I kept the progress on both sides the same to ensure the pulling force is balanced on both sides.
Once I clecoed all skins, I literally ran out of 3.2 clecos 
And while I had the fuselage sideways, I also superfil-ed all rivets.
Video
Here is a video summary of what I’ve done so far on the fuselage