04-01-2014: 4 hrs
Finally I got a big chunk of time to tackle the taillight problem. The taillight installation should be straightforward if there is no grounding issue. In taillight instl manual says to ground the case of the light through attaching screws. However, the light will be screwed to an adapter ring which is riveted to the fiberglass rudder fairing. I need to attach a ground wire from the adapter ring to the rudder. What I did is to drill a #27 hole, then strip a wire and insert the wire through the hold. Then I used an aluminum pop rivet to fill the hole. The wire is sandwiched between the expanded rivet shank and the ring. After that, I then attached the other end of the wire to rudder structure using a countersunk screw. This worked well as a ground path for the taillight housing. With that done, I permanently riveted the rudder bottom fairing in place, and installed the light.
Done the tail light, I moved on to torque the spar bolts. These bolts were just slided in with nuts and washers attached. I know this can be very difficult for a -7A model, it's much easier for a tail dragger version. But still, a few bolts are hard to put a torque wrench on, specially the lower outboard NAS1304 and lower NAS1307 bolts. I torqued these bolts by feel. The rest were torque to spec (60 in-lbs for NAS1304 bolts, 470 in-lbs for NAS1307 bolts)
