Rudder Installed

In the morning I had the joy to remove the left and right torque arms. I put them on the work bench and prepared them for match drilling the belly side holes.

That was easy. Opening them up and drilling them through with a #12 bit needed a bit of thought. I chose the drill press for a straight path for the bolt that will later get installed.

With some Boelube the drill bit went right through without a hitch. After the deburring the pieces looked like this.

Installing them back in the belly, along with the torque tubes, was harder than taking them out. I hate those washers on the inside of a bracket. I glued them successfully in place with Superglue. That made it a bit easier.

After lunch I pulled the ridder cables through the aft bulkhead using the rope I had routed and affixed to the tail cone almost 2 years ago.

I temporarily attached those steel plates to the cable forks.

Then I attached the vertical stab to the tail cone. It is not an illusion that it looks like it's taller than the entrance of the carport. It definitely is too tall. I also had to move the fuselage way forward to clear the stab and the rudder, so I might have to take the assembly off again until I get to the hangar. I wouldn't be able to install the engine otherwise.

Here's a better shot:

Installing the rudder was a nightmare. The glued on washers wouldn't stay on because of too much lateral force on insertion and I couldn't get a finger and a bolt in on the top hinge. Fiddling with pliers didn't give enough grip to force the bolt in. After half an hour I finally succeeded by accident. This is probably the worst part of the assembly so far.

I centered the rudder with a string once it was installed. The strings follows a rivet line on the rudder and ends on each trailing edge of the stab. Measuring the distance between those two points divided by two gives you the center mark on the string. You also mark the ends of course. Then hold the end marks on the trailing edge and adjust the rudder with the tip of your nose until the edge of the rudder is on the marked center spot on the string. I verified by eyeballing that I wasn't all off and clamped the plates to the rudder horn.

In the cabin I had the pleasure to install Denny Myrick's gift he gave me at our last meet at the airport - his rudder jig! He saved me a lot of time building this piece. Thanks again for this, Denny!!!

I pulled pretty hard when tightening the ridder cables but it didn't feel like the left one was giving much. The right one came out significantly farther than the left one. So I checked on the inside if there was slack on the left cable. Nope, not as far as I can see.

However, when I unclamped them after marking, they looked like this.

I will have to check with other builders if this deviation is common or if I made a mistake here. So until then I will hold off on drilling them.
Update: Bill and Dave confirmed this is a reasonable difference that reflects the difference in the rudder horns on the pedals.

Not sure what next to do. Tomorrow I have to go back to the paying job and I believe rigging the stabilator is next. More fun with washers I believe.

Tips Installed

Yesterday, when I wrote the outlook for today's work, I expected to be rather short of work than not being able to complete all the tasks I had planned to do. Trimming the rudder and vertical stabilizer tips seemed to be rather benign and a job to be completed in a few minutes.
It turned out to take me 5 hours to complete it. I started by emphasizing the scribe line for the initial rough trimming.

With the help of the belt sander I was able to quickly remove the excess material and get a nice fit of the tips.

The next step was to match drill the tips to the rudder and the vertical stabilizer. I started with the latter.

Then there was some more trimming to the tip of the vertical stabilizer required. The aft edge had to follow the edge of the metal skin. Again, the belt sander made a quick task out of this.

And then the process stalled. I had to temporarily install the rudder and connect it with the stabilizer. However, Van's must have used kid's labor to get these bolts in there on their SLSA. I have no other explanation that they ended up with a access space so tiny and claiming that they succeeded. It took me what like forever to get the bolts in there. Initially, I had even tried to get the washers in there but quickly succumbed to the inexplicable aggravation this attempt had caused in respect to the aforementioned tiny space. So I ended up inserting the bolts only and lifting the rudder slightly when checking for clearance. It's not really a delicate tolerance to begin with.

About 8 or 10 times of removing the tip, sanding it a bit more and reinstalling it, I was at the required fit of 1/8" clearance to any edges over the full travel range from stop to stop. I mainly used the belt sander again but also the Dremel tool with the drum sander in a few spots.
I finally riveted the tip to the rudder. Holding off on the stabilizer at that point as I discovered that the primer I had sprayed about two years ago was a bit thin on the top rib. As this one would get exposed most to environmental influences, I decided to top the coat with some Napa primer and let this dry before riveting the tip in place.

That was my day in the shop. I assume tomorrow will then take care of the rest of yesterday's outlook. This was to work on the rear bulkhead and floor panel. I am not planing for anything else at this point as this got delayed so many times before already.

Rudder Finished

In the evening of Memorial Day, I got to finish riveting the other side of the rudder and summing up the hours. Not much else to report. The rudder took me 14.5 hours to complete, including the prep work and the priming.

Finishing the Rudder

The next day I rushed out to the shop to get that rudder finished. Everything was prepared and I was eager to get this part done.
With all the knowledge acquired from the other blogs I had the feeling that I was well prepared and that I knew what had to be done.
And indeed, it really worked without a hitch! Only the day was a bit too short. In the evening I grew tired pulling all those pop rivets and I just finished attaching one skin to the rudder and left the other one for the following morning.

The Rudder and Schmetterling Aviation

I started the rudder by preparing and prepping all parts as the number of parts is very low and it was easy to read ahead and see what I was supposed to do to finish this quickly. Now that I have the primer I want to reduce the amount of time spent to clean the spray gun and that is by collecting as many pieces for a spraying session as possible.
So, I match drilled, deburred edges and holes as far as possible until it was time to rivet - oh, wait! There was this one really awkward step in building the rudder. And that was to trial fit the clecoed rudder spar to the already finished rudder (you'll need to have finished the hinges - remember?).
There was no hint in the manual how in the world I was supposed to fiddle those handful of washers into the different places they were supposed to go into with just my own two hands! With a lot of patience (did I mention that I'm not good at that?) and calm hands and some sort of nihilism I finally put them all where they were supposed to go and ..... it just matched perfectly! It revealed that the travel stop for the rudder which is built into the lower hinge assembly was not even on both sides and the rudder horn did not rest on a large area on that stop on one side. This would cause some wear on the aluminum part later and as I had the upside down (and the downside up), I could easily trim this little thing to make it a flat fit. I quickly reprimed it to cover up the blank aluminum and that was that.
After all this time spent on putting it together I had a hard time to disassemble it - knowing that I would have to do this again some time far away. With a muffled sigh I did what I had to do and continued on to finish the rudder.
Now, as I am following other builder's blogs and websites, I was aware of two major problem I could have run into. The best (and most entertaining) description of these are from the Schmetterling Aviation blog maintained by Dave. He's quite a bit ahead of me and he seems to interpret Oregonian in the same way as I do which means we both seem to scratch our heads about the same manual instructions and run into the same problems.
Reading ahead in his blog told me that some of the rivets I was supposed to use where a tad too long and tend to bend (in a spot where drilling them out is not so easy) and that putting the shop head on the outside of an assembly can avoid the the thin ribs from separating from the opposite part. Be careful about the rivets that connect the rib to the spar where the spar caps go on (put the shop head outside (so that they're visible after assembly) and take extra care to shorten them to the necessary length as they're a bit too long. Also, when riveting the trimmed rib to the rudder horn, make sure that you put the shop head on the side of the rudder horn back plate although this won't look as pretty. Otherwise the rib will try to separate from the rudder horn back plate and this could be a structural issue (the rib is just a bit too thin to stay straight when the rivet forms the shop head).

I got everything prepared and ready for final assembly and then the day was over. The primer got some time to dry overnight which is good as the inside of the skin won't dry as fast as open parts.

Preparing the Rudder Ribs

So Van's had sent me the replacement parts to rebuild the upper hinge assembly for the V-Stab and so it was prep time again. As I wanted to prime the parts I took care of some more parts as the rudder ribs got drilled anddeburred and were ready for priming as well. As my Cortec primer finally arrived I wanted to use this expensive stuff and see if it really works wonders or not. This type of primer (Cortec VcPI-373 and the surface preparation with Cortec VcPI-440) is supposed to be applied with a spray gun and I had to learn how to use this tool before I felt good enough to try it on the real parts. I'm still learning the little details but for primer work I'm doing good enough.
I have to say that I'm pretty impressed by the Cortec stuff. Environmentally not too harmful, no nasty fumes and still a great result on aluminum.