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My nut plates arrived and I got lots of miscellanous things done on the rudder skeleton. Most of the work was done on the counterbalance. I must say that the counterbalance skin is incredibly difficult to get properly fit. I really took my time though and the quality is good.

Other bits I got completed was riveting the remainder of the reinforcement plates and trimming a bit more off the forward end of the rudder stiffeners. I didn’t like how close they were sitting to the spar.

Another good day. I’ll start riveting the rudder skins next.

After many delays I finally made some progress on the rudder. I got all the various parts deburred, countersunk, dimpled, and primed. I did notice that I appear to be missing the three nut plates for the spar though :( Got those on the way from Vans and pushed forward. I also barely had enough primer left to coat all the remaining parts. Ordered some more of that from Amazon as well.

I got the bottom rib riveted and left off at the counterbalance skin. Good progress.

Not much to report here. Got the rudder all disassembled and ready to be deburred, countersunk, dimpled, primed, and finally riveted together. That will be this weekend hopefully.

My replacement rudder stiffeners finally arrived a few days ago so I was able to push forward once again. The stiffeners and skins are all riveted and primed at this point. I was able to get up to the point of match drilling the skins to the skeleton before calling it a day.

One thing I noticed is that before I started the match drilling the trailing edge was very, very straight. Nearly perfect actually. After I completed the match drilling I looked down the trailing edge again and saw it had buckled in a few places.

I have a vague plan of getting a piece of angle steel to do the trailing edge back riveting against. I’ve even seen some guys match drill right into the steel and then cleo into it and do the riveting that way. My hope is that doing something like that will keep the trailing edge nice and straight. We will see.

Having done all I can on the rudder skins and stiffeners (I’m still waiting on the replacement stiffeners via UPS) I decided to move on to the rudder skeleton.

Nothing much to report here. The R-913 counterbalance skin was VERY hard to get aligned to the R903 and R-912 ribs for some reason. It must be machined to be an incredibly close fit. I actually took the whole assembly apart and started all over again just to be sure I wasnt forcing the fit any more than I had to.

At any rate I made some good progress. Still need to finish match drilling R-913 to the ribs and then do the edge prep dance, prime, etc.

Still waiting for the replacement rudder stiffeners to arrive. I’m impatient though so over the last few nights I’ve gotten the rudder skins edge prepped and about half dimpled. The rudders I did have that were cut correctly have been finished, dimpled and primed as well.

Tonight I got a couple of them back riveted to one of the rudder skins as well.

I was able to get the rudder stiffeners cut to length tonight and started work on trimming them down. Sadly, I trimmed them exactly backwards.

Time to order some new stiffeners :)

Another milestone was reached today. I stayed a little late in the shop and managed to put the last rivet in the the vertical stabilizer. Feels pretty great to have it completed.

I learned another little lesson tonight. I had put two layers of duct tape on the flush set of my rivet gun to help protect the skins. This actually allowed the rivets to work back up off the skin when they were being driven. I ended up drilling out about 15 rivets, taking the duct tape off, putting one piece of painters tape over the rivet itself, and re-setting them. Much, much better. You can see before and after pictures below.

Next up – the rudder!

I made some great progress today and made a few silly mistakes. That’s bound to happen though, right? :)

I got the VS-702 front spar and all the ribs (VS-704, VS-705, VS706, and VS-707) surface prepped and primed and dove right into riveting them together. I wasnt paying very close attention to the instructions though and riveted the rear spar combination onto the rest of the assembly. Silly. I should have known when the instructions said to use LP4-3 blind rivets to attach VS-707 that something wasnt right. The second mistake was a couple really poorly set rivets on the VS-705/VS-702/VS-704 combination. Enough said on that.

At any rate, after drilling out the rivets I shouldn’t have set and removing the rear spar, I prepped and primed the inside of the VS-801PP skin and clecoed it to the VS skeleton. I had enough time to set about 15 rivets and it was time to call it a day.

All in all some great progress. All that remains is to finish riveting the VS-801PP skin onto the assembly and it will be time to start on the rudder!

Tonight I got VS-803PP and VS-808PP all prepped and primed and then riveted them together with the hinges (VS-401PP, VS-411PP, and VS-412PP).

I am again impressed with what a nice job the pneumatic squeezer does on setting rivets. Quite nice. Next up will be the ribs and finally the skin.

I also started pondering how, if at all, I am going to prep the VS-909 fiberglass tip for the addition of a forward facing tail camera. I have seen a lot of other builders do it and it would be really slick to have. I have a little time yet so we will see. I might just end up drilling a small hole and running a fish-line so it’s easy to add a camera at some point in the future.