Jabiru 430.com
A novice builders experience with building a Jabiru J430 aeroplane.
These related to issues such as screws and panels loosening,  Issues with doors not completely sealing against rain,  tweaks to spatts.

One thing you should be aware of is that everything that can loosen ....will loosen! 
The fairings in the basic kit come with self tapping screws to hold them in place.

These screws tend to chew out the fibreglass a little every time they are done up or removed.  I found out early in the build that you should banish all mechanical screw drivers to the bin when working on a fibreglass aircraft. They will strip a thread faster than you can let go the trigger. They might seem like they save time and effort but in the long run you are much better off using a hand screw driver.

I also used a little drop of silastic in the holes every time I screwed them up up but even that only delays the day when the thread strips and you have to go to bigger and bigger screws.


As a consequence fairings suffer badly and I lost both the small quadrangular panels that covered the belly surface outer ends of the main gear struts, within the first few months or so of flying . And what was worse the factory had changed to a new model and had no replacements for the old model. The new model didn't easily fit and would have necessitated a major renovation.  So I took the easiest nut still complicated route of remanufacturing from scratch the panels I  had lost.


What I have now done is replace most of the self taping screws with threaded inserts and standard machine screws. These inserts screw into a drilled hole (with some flock & epoxy to hold them) and give a firm hold on the fairing.
The inserts are available from Jabiru (but unfortunately are pretty expensive.) but are worth the cost.




The doors have never sealed well against rain or cold air higher altitudes.  The problem is one of doors that never quite fit the jams exactly and seals that seem to be impossible to get to sit in the right place.  I have recently removed all the Jabiru supplied seals and replaced them with 10 X 6 mm slow re-expanding foam strip to try and make a better seal. These have made it a bit harder to close the doors but they seem to have made the seal better. I haven't been through  rain with these yet (nor the newly installed gutters over the doors, but hopefully the dual approach will have cured the problem of getting wet.





The spatts probably suffered most from the problem of screws loosening all the time. I also have the problem that I was regularly visiting grass and gravel airstrips which made the spatts vibrate a lot.
So I was finding the screws loosening rapidly and the older style brackets I have becoming loose almost after every flight.

I changed the slots and cut-outs for screws on the strut brackets so that instead of wide arc  holes (to allow adjustments) I filled them in with flock and then drilled the holes for the screws exactly where I needed them. Then I took to using Locktite on all the screws every time I tightened them and they now last much longer.



Minor Fixes