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Friday, December 23, 2016

Rudder assembly

Once you get the rudder assembled then there's a whole bunch of match drilling.






Preparing the trailing edge is kind of tricky.  The problem is that you drill it perpendicular to the rudder chord line, but countersink it perpendicular to the rudder skin.  The pilot on the countersink bit wants to follow the hole.  I sweated this a lot until doing some research and finding out you can just hold it in your hand and countersink.  When you hold the wedge in your hand, the existing hole in the wedge will force the countersink bit at the wrong angle for a little bit, but then you can put a little force on the wedge and get the correct countersink angle to remove the rest of the material.  From what I read online, it doesn't have to be perfect.  I think mine came out pretty good, will see once its riveted together.
Oh - and one sneaky thing in the plans.  They call out a part number for the wedge that isn't in the inventory list.  The number you use is listed in the figure. Took me more time than I'll admit to figure that out.



Then you pull it all apart again and commence deburring.  There's probably 500 holes in this thing, and each gets deburred 4 times.





Finally primed the whole works.  I'm getting better at this, but it still takes a while.  The most time consuming part is scotchbrite scrubbing every part.  Results were better this time because I learned to blow-dry every piece before bringing it to the paint booth.





Then it all starts going back together. First is some spar reinforcements and nutplates.




Then back-riveting the stiffeners to the skins.  Back riveting is awesome, it leaves the manufactured head ultra-flush on the skin.




Getting that aft rivet set on the top rib is a little bit tricky.  Here's how I did it, worked great.  Found a air hammer chisel to stick in there, elevated the back end of it with a squeezer yoke I had laying around.  Then hold it steady and hit the chisel with the rivet gun.  Like butta.


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