I made it to the shop on Sunday for a few hours. I was hoping t finish the rudder in 2018, but spending the rest of my time off with friends and family seemed more important, so this was the final working session of the year.
I started off by finishing up riveting the stringers onto the rudder skin. My back riveting has really improved as I have been moving forward. I realized that the back rivet set diameter was a little to big for the placement of the rivet in the stringer. I needed to tilt the rivet gun into the stringer flange when starting the rivets to set them straight.
I checked all the rivets with my rivet guage and did have to drill out several that I didn’t like and redo them.
Next I installed the R-00914 Shear Clips.
These are installed with pop rivets, which I thought were going to be easy but my rivet squeezer needed up scratching off some of the primer on the rivet skins. Once I realize this I’ve put down a strip of painters tape to protect the skin and that seem to work really well.
The plans call for using pop rivets and all four of the rivet holes in that sheer clips and one of the holes in the stringers closest to the sheer clips to join the 2 skins together.
While I was installing the two skins together and riveting the stringers I was also Clecoing the trailing edge and removing the backing on the tape from the other side of the trailing edge to secure it to the left rudder skin. I had already removed the adhesive tape and secure that to the right rudder skin clecoed it down and used finger pressure to secure it. I read it a few other blogs of people match drilling a piece of angle iron and clecoing it to the rudder skin with the trailing edge to make sure it bonds well and keeps the rudder trailing edge straight. I decided to just follows Vans section 5.7 and not try this, mostly I was worried a out enlarging the holes in the really thin skins, .016”, or in the trailing edge piece when match drilling into angle iron. It seems that using the angle iron was a left over from when Vans had you use fuel tank sealant to bond the trailing edge to the skins and the variation in thickness of application could cause the end result to be wavy, which isn’t an issue when using the now recommended tape since it’s uniformed in thickness. Now any wavyness will be from my poor riveting techniques if anything.
This would have been a time that it was nice to have a second helper. I use a box to hold the left right or skin up while I was trying to work between the two skins and rivet the stringers together. Somehow I manage to skip one of the singers and a rivet this next one, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal at the time. But it turns out the distance between the stringers is smaller than the pop rivet squeezer handle needs to open to properly squeeze pop rivets, so went right to work back and put a rivet in the stringers I missed it didn’t sit flush and the Riverhead is sitting offer the stringer a little bit. I’ve decided to leave it for now, since I may rebuild the rudder at the end of the airplane anyway.
After I got all the pop rivets installed I put a bunch of heavy crap on the trailing edge in mind that the trailing edge with the edge of my workbench, hoping that it will help the tape adhere to both rudder skins and keep the trailing edge as straight as possible before riveting.
Rudder 5.0 Hours
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