Rudder
Back to riveting the ridder together. I started with the rudder horn and leading edge, then moved onto the common holes for the skins and the spar.
The Root end of the rudder had a bit more skin to the point where the squeezer just barely reached and caused a few miss squeezes on my part. So more drilling rivet practice!
Next I installed the counter weight, no pictures sadly, the counter weight needed a bit of trimming to clear the shop heads of the rivets. Also, the plans call for the leading edge to be riveted together after you install the counter weight. This is impossible, you can't get a bucking bar between the leading edge of the rudder horn and the weight once its installed so I had to unistall the weight and set the rivets first. Then I installed the top rib, which covers the counter weight and caps the rudder. But since I had riveted the rudder horn trailing edge already I had to drill out the 2 top rivets because they are common with the rib.
Some how in the assembly process I missed installing a rivet in the lower row of the rudder??? Since it was 1 away from trailing edge everything was really tight and I couldn't get a bucking bar behind it....so more rivet drilling and a piece of wood to wedge between the piece solved that problem.
Next I moved onto the dreaded trailing edge. Vans recommends that you half shoot every 10th rivets starting in the middle and working your way outward. Then half shooting the middle of every 10th and the middle of those and again until they are all half set. Then go back and fully set them all using the same patter. On one of the forums I saw a guy put tape down and numbered the rivets pattern and I thought this was a good idea so I copied it, and used the back riveting technique to set the rivets.
I really couldn't be more happy with how the trailing edge turned out. Im not sure I could make it any straighter.
I then moved on to rolling the leading edge. The plans have to tape a broom handle to the metal and roll it to introduce the bend before you rivet so the sheets are not preloaded and likely to crack in the future. This turned out to be really easy, but I had to make things hard by rolling the bottom one first which made it difficult to work the upper ones since the rudder horn made using the broom handle only possible from below.
Rudder 6.0 Hours
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