John Godwin wrote: >I have a quick question for the group. I am planning on using an RC servo >and Langford style hinge for my trim tab. My question is do I put down peal >ply before I glass my elevator to provide an attach point for my hardware?
There are probably other good reasons for using peelply, but you attach the trim tab hardware to the inside of the elevator, rather than the outside, so I wouldn't consider that a requirement for using it. Roughing up a previously glassed surface with 80 grit sandpaper or rougher will certainly prepare something for sticking to epoxy, so don't let that slow you down. I did a search on that page at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/trimtab/index.html and I didn't find peel ply anywhere. You may notice that I hogged out a place for that bellcrank on the tab, and then floxed it in and added a layer of carbon fiber over it to lock it in place. It ain't going anywhere! Having said all this, trim tabs are way overrated in KRs...at least in mine. I flew two hours and did 13 touch and goes at four airports today, and I don't remember ever touching the trim button. The only time I use it is on long cross-country flights. I'll be the first to admit that I don't have enough trim tab to deal with my full flaps, but it's not even a pound of force to compensate, and I don't even think about it, I just do whatever it takes to keep from terribly embarrassing myself on an approach. On almost all of the landings I did what most would consider a scary full slip (rudder to the floor) to drop in to within a few feet of the end of the runway (short ones), straightened it out at the last second and did another landing that didn't kill me, all in the interest of practicing emergency landings. That was a lot of good clean fun, on a really nice day for that kind of thing... Mark Langford N56ML "at" hiwaay.net website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
