In Part 3, all 18 of the F-14122 Root Fairing Stiffeners were prepared. Today, we prepared the two Upper and two Lower Wing Root Fairings. The work on these fairings was pretty straight forward, so I didn’t included any pictures of the preparation…..just the finished product.
The Fairings themselves had the edges cleaned, holes final-drilled #17, appropriate holes dimpled for #6 screws, treated with Alumiprep, treated with Alodine and sprayed with Akzo primer. The nine Stiffeners for each Fairing were of various lengths, so they only fit in one location. I could have back riveted the Stiffeners to the Fairings, but I decided to squeeze them with the pneumatic squeezer. Either method would have worked fine. Here are the completed F-14188A-L (top) & -R (bottom) Upper Wing Root Fairings. You can see all 18 Stiffeners have been riveted into place and the appropriate holes have been dimpled.
These are the F-14118A-L (top) & -R (bottom) Lower Wing Root Fairings. For preparation purposes, these two Fairings were prepared the same way as the Upper Fairings with one additional step. You can see the forward portion of the Fairings are bent upward. The plans tell you to mark two tangent lines onto the top side of the Fairings. One line was 6 3/8” and the other was 8 7/8” from the forward edge of the Fairing. The Fairings now had to be bent around a piece of tubing. (I used a spare piece of tubing from an Aileron counterweight that I secured in a bench vice …..worked perfectly). You place the rear tangent line on the top center of the tubing and bend the Fairing downward around the tubing until the forward tangent line touches the tubing on the bottom side. Sound complicated? It wasn’t! We had to tweak the bend a few times to match the airplane, but it work out pretty nicely. The plans do a very good job of explaining the process. Here are the two completed Fairings. The hole in the center of each fairing will be for the fuel vent line to go through.
Here is a little closer look at the bends we made on the Fairings. Very happy with how they came out.
Backing up just a little bit…..prior to dimpling the holes in the Lower Root Fairings, they had to be used to mark the installation locations of the K1100-08 nutplates (circled in the two pictures below). The first picture is the right side installation and the second picture is the left side. The two Root Fairing Attach Angles (angles the nutplates are riveted on) did not have any prepunched holes in the bottom portion of the angle. These holes were made by match-drilling the corresponding hole locations in the Lower Root Fairings. After these holes were drilled (which will be where the screw passes through to the nutplate) you can use one of the nutplates to match-drill the nutplate attach holes. Pretty easy process that was been used throughout the airplane on several occasions.
Lastly, the two F-1099C Wing Walk Spacers were installed as shown in the two pictures below. The plans instruct you to scuff the lower surface of the Spacer and its bonding location on the upper surface of the Main Spar Assembly. I initially used grey Scotchbrite and finished up with 80 grit sandpaper. The plans tell you to use proseal to bond the Spacer, but I didn’t have any available. So, I used RTV adhesive for the bonding. I applied the adhesive to the Spacer, used a popsicle stick to smooth the adhesive evenly on the surface, pressed the Spacer into position, and wiped away the excess that oozed out the sides…..done! Looks pretty good to me.
