28Nov2017

Moved on to the Rudder!

Ribs for the rudder. Each set of ribs comes as one large piece in the kit. You have to cut the piece in half to get the two ribs, and then you have to trim the angle using a steel straight edge and scribe or pen. The bandsaw comes in real handy for this!

This is the tie down strap for the counterweight in the upper forward end of the rudder. You take these two nutplates and rivet them in place. a #10 screw bolts in from the bottom of the counterweight rib, through the lead weight and into these nutplates to hold the weight in place.

This is what the nutplates looked like after I used the squeezer. The squeezer seems to work well on the size 3 rivets. I haven't had much success with the squeezer on the size 4 rivets yet.

Starting to assemble the skeleton for the rudder. Here I have attached the bottom rib, rudder horn, and three attachment point brackets. These will be where the hinge attaches to the rudder from the Vertical Stabilizer.

A close up of the brackets as I am preparing to rivet everything in place.

This is the rudder horn assembly at the base of the rudder.

These two pictures are my initial attempts at riveting size 4 rivets! As I stated above, I was unable to use the squeezer, so these are my first real attempts at using the bucking bar and rivet gun. Overall, not too displeased with the outcome. A few of them are a little over squeezed, but I used the rivet gauge and ensured none of them were under-squeezed!

And this is where I am at as of today! I have assembled most of the skeleton to this point. After this, I will attach the skins and do the match drilling. After that, I take everything apart, debur everything and then final fit and rivet everything together! I should have this all done by the end of the week!


So, as the title suggests, I have moved forward to working on the rudder! As I stated in my last post, I made a couple mistakes and had to re-order some parts and so, while I wait, I decided to move on to the next step. I was able to put in about 8 hours of work yesterday and got this far on the rudder. I'm pretty impressed with how well it came along! I should have this done within the next couple days, which will be just in time for the replacement parts for the VS to arrive and I will be able to finish that as well!

For the most part, the plans have been fairly straight forward and easy to understand. There have been a few spots that I have had to re-read a few times to understand what the plans are actually calling for, but for the most part, it's been pretty easy to this point.