December 14th 2004

Tearing Down Our

Original Damaged Tail Boom

After alot of pondering whether to buy a new tail boom or rebuild our old one

we decided to take the cheaper route and go for rebuilding our original one. We've heard that it takes some 90 labor intensive hours to build one from scratch and really didn't want to put that kind of time into it much less the intensive labor part lol. Winter came on us and time is something we have plenty of but unfortunately the down side to that is funds are extremely low this time of year which is primarily why we made the decision to rebuild rather than the buy a new one.

We started out by removing all the parts from the tail boom like the vertical tail fin, horizontal fins, ballast weight bracket, com antenna, and finally the tail rotor slider rails. The work wasn't hard but the mental side of it sure was. It was pretty difficult to have a happy attitude while we were taking apart something we worked so hard to build. Each and every part has a memory along with it.  It's kind of like when you look at an old photograph and get that mental flashback.

After we got all that off we drilled out all the rivets on nut plates and Dzus springs and then the rivet heads that held it all together.  Beginning with the bottom panels we tried to drill out the pop rivets but found that with the center pins still in the rivets the bit would walk itself around it.  The only to get the pins out is to use a hammer and that wasn't going to work because the tail boom it's self isn't stable enough to pound on.  What we ended up doing is grinding the heads of the rivets off with an air rotary tool with a thin cutting disk on it.  This worked pretty well as long as we didn't allow the rivets to get to hot which causes them to weld them selfs to the skin.  When that happens you have to grind deeper into the skin which is something we didn't want to because we were trying to get this thing apart with minimal damage.  The reason we wanted to do that is we plan on using the old skin as as a pattern and for that were going to need every hole in it to be as neat and clean as possible. After we tried every grinding and cutting disk we had at our disposal we found that the thin 3/32 X 4" diameter cutting disk worked the best.  We have two of these rotary tools, one being very powerful and the other being very weak meaning it doesn't take a whole lot of pressure to stop it. We found that the lesser powered air rotary tool we had worked the best because it didn't get the rivet as hot while the stronger one would get the rivet so hot it would just fuse the metal together.  Once we figured all that out and got started it only took about 30 seconds per rivet and in about an hour we had the skin completely off.

With the skin laying on the table we cut out the damaged part

which allowed the skin to lay completely flat.

After that we started removing all the remaining rivet shafts in the bulk heads and stringers.

For that we used a pair of hog nosed pliers first gripping the shafts and rotating them until they were loose and then rocking them back and forth extracting them.  This works great and we had them all out in about 30 minutes.

Finding a spot to store 11 foot long parts wasn't an easy task lol

This is where we ended up storing the long tail boom parts until the new materials came in.

END