Today I drilled all of the backing strips to their respective tips. This pic is of the elevator tip strip being clamped on and drilled. You can see the hair dryer in the background used for bending and forming the tips. I saw a hint on the net about heating the fiberglass to allow you to bend it to better match the places they fit. Heat it up, bend it, and hold it in place while it cools off. It worked pretty good and now all the tips fit snuggly in their spots.
Here's the vertical stabilizer tip after being countersunk. I just used a countersink bit in the 'speed deburring' tool. It was quick and easy. I think the drill would have been way too much and the countersink woudl probably have gone WAY too deep. You can see the backing strip is clamped on there to provide a nice guide for the countersink bit.
Here's the trick to getting the lip to fit perfectly against the skins. A while back, I put it in place about where it was supposed to be, drilled the holes and notice that there were some places that the skin overlapped the lip a bit. So I marked where the edge of the skin was with the marker while the tip was clecoed in there. I took off the tip and used the file to move the lip where it needed to go. The fact that the file has teeth on the edge made this super easy. You can see some lines I made to mark where the worst fit was so that I would be sure to work that area the most.
Also today I decided to mess around a bit with N-numbers on the net. After looking at what other people had chosen, and aiming for something simple, I ran across the perfect registration number, N7ZS. Short (no worries about inappropriately shortening your call sign with ATC when it's only 3 digits already!), and quite pertinent (7 for RV-7, and ZS, my initials). So I went ahead and paid the FAA the $10 to reserve it!
