Rudder

Today I finished the rudder by bending the leading edge and hanging it on the wall. Abel, a student of my wife, came to help out a bit.

The smaller part of the edge was easy to do alone.

Abel's help was appreciated for the bigger bends. He did his first rivets today!

Looking good!

Looking through the holes...

Done with the rudder. We temporarily hung it on the vertical stabilizer to see how the fit was. As expected great :-) It moves smoothly to both directions.

Stored until the fuselage is done enough to hang the tail on the end.

Spent some quality time in the workshop tonight and finally finished the rudder trailing edge.

This is the side with the factory heads.

And here is the side with the shop heads. Didn't come out bad at all.

And here is the whole rudder. Beautiful isn't it?

Only the leading edge left to do!

Used proseal to glue the rudder trailing edge together with the wedge and cleco it to the alu angle. I'm going to leave this to dry for a couple of days and then rivet the thing together!

Cleaned and primed the trailing edge wedge. The pro-seal to glue the trailing edge together has arrived in the mail today.

Made some tools today.

Made good progress today. Riveted the rudder skins on the structure (the 4" no-hole yoke worked great for this), riveted the rudder horn brace on, installed the counterweight in place and countersunk the holes in the trailing edge wedge.

Prepared the trailing edge on an alu angle (as per the instructions) for gluing next week when the pro-seal arrives in the mail.

I just noticed tonight that I made a mistake dimpling the skins last week :-( I used the tank dimple dies instead of the 3/32" as I should have. All the dimples are a tiny bit to deep and the rivets are not completely flush with the skin. Also means they are not squeezable. I tried reversing the dimples on the counterweight skin and then redoing them with the correct dimple die and that seemed to have worked. At least I was able to squeeze the rivets after that.

Riveting the rest of the rudder structure went without problems.

Riveted the top two reinforcement plates onto the front spar tonight. Pretty quiet!

Got a chance to prime rudder parts while I was waiting for my pizza to heat up in the oven. Means I can start riveting tomorrow!

Another 4 hours in the shop today. Definitely a good weekend! I match-drilled the skins to the structure and made the bottom attach strips and drilled those in.

Worked the horn brace, put it in place and match-drilled it to the skin and rudder horn.

After having disassembled the whole rudder, I deburred holes and dimped most of the skins, spars and ribs. I'll have to wait for my vise-grip dimpler to come in the mail tomorrow to dimple the rear part of the flange on the top rib and bottom spar since I couldn't get these in with the squeezer. I alu-etched all the parts so that I can hopefully prime them Tuesday.

Tomorrow evening there is an EAA chapter meeting and I haven't been to one for a while due to work and plane, so I plan to attend.

Today I went to Lowes to buy a new table top (got a particle board cut at 3 feet), an aluminium angle, some wire to hang the stiffeners up on the clothing rack for priming and a big steel bar to use as bucking bar for the back-riveting (I polished it and it worked well by the way). I etched and primed the stiffeners, followed by a drying period. After that I back-riveted them to both the skins. This was really pretty easy! (as everyone else is saying on their blogs).

Picture of the do-it-yourself steel backrivet bucking bar.

Then I started to cleco the front and bottom spars together, cleco'd the ribs on followed by the counterweight skin.

Finally I clecod the skins and the leading edge bar on and this is what it looks like:

A very productive day!

I dimpled both the rudder skins with the C-frame and the stiffeners with the squeezer. Piece of cake, but time-consuming task. I've cleco'd the front and bottom spars together and enlarged the hole with a unibit. It's too cold here to prime so that will have to wait until temps go up again (maybe the weekend).

Not much exciting going on today. Deburred stiffeners and both the left and right rudder skins (wow! lots of holes).

First a happy new year to everybody reading this of course. I match drilled the stiffeners to the right and left rudder skins today. My workbench table top has a lot of holes in it now, but I had planned to replace it with a 3 feet version anyway.

Worked on the rudder stiffeners today. After having cut the pieces I got from Van's in two with my snips, I used the holes in the rudder skins to put them in the right position and find the place where they have to be trimmed.

Then used the polishing wheel on my buffer to trim them all to size. Here's an example:

And when all had been processed, it looks like this:

Pretty productive two hours this afternoon, since I wouldn't have thought this would be so quick and easy.