Tail surfaces back together

This week I cleaned all the tail surface fabric, all the vertical stabilizer, horizontal stabilizer, rudder and elevator tubes, and replaced all broken tube connectors and saddles, the re-assembled everything using new aircraft-grade AN hardware. I did not replace all the hinge eye-bolts. They are just a bit rusty and discolored. I wire-brushed them to remove the rust and cleaned them up. They will have a coat of lithium grease on them when installed so I'm not concerned with their condition. They would have cost me about $6 each to replace and there are 14 of them just on the tail surfaces. They will be fine. Here is a shot of all the cleaned-up and re-assembled surfaces. This represents about 15 hours of work.



I'm supposed to be receiving a bunch of parts from Phantom Aeronautics next week. I will then start re-assembling the entire plane, minus wings. I'm not really quite sure about how I'll get it to the airport like that, so maybe I'll have to take it to the field in sub-assemblies. I'm anxious to start putting the fuse back together. I really am dreading the disassembly of the wings, not only for the labor involved, but the damage that I'm expecting to find. Maybe I'll get lucky and won't have to do anything more than cleaning, but that hasn't been the case thus far!